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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https ://archive.org/details/mythologyOOharr 


Mur Debt to Greece and Rome 


EDITORS 
GeorGeE DepueE Hapzsirs, Px.D. 
University of Pennsylvania 
Davip Moore Rosrnson, Pu.D., LL.D. 
The fohns Hopkins University 





CONTRIBUTORS TO THE “OUR DEBT TO 
GREECE AND ROME FUND,” WHOSE 
GENEROSITY HAS MADE POSSIBLE 
THE LIBRARY 


Mur Debt to Greece and Rome 


Philadel phia 

Dr. ASTLEY P. C. ASHHURST 
Joun C. BELL 
Henry H. BONNELL 
JASPER YEATES BRINTON 
GEORGE BURNHAM, JR. 
JoHN CADWALADER 
Miss CLARA COMEGYS 
Miss Mary E. CONVERSE 
ARTHUR G. DICKSON 
WittiamM M. ELKINS 
H. H. FurNEss, JR. 
WitiiAm P. GEST 
JOHN GRIBBEL 
SAMUEL F. Houston 
CHARLES EDWARD INGERSOLL 
Joun Story JENKS 
ALBA B. JOHNSON 
Miss NINA LEA 
GEORGE McFADDEN 
Mrs. JOHN MARKOE 
JuLes E. MastBAuM 
J. VAUGHAN MERRICK 
EFFINGHAM B. Morris 
WitttAM R. Murpuy 
Joun S. NEWBOLD 
S. Davis PAGE (memorial) 
OweEN J. RoBERTS 
JosEPH G. ROSENGARTEN 
Wit1rAM C. SPROUL 
Joun B. STETSON, Jr. 
Dr. J. WILLIAM WHITE 

(memorial) 
GEORGE D. WIDENER 
Mrs. JAMEs D. WINSOoR 
OweEN WISTER 

The Philadelphia Society 
for the Promotion of Liberal 
Studies. 


Boston 
Oric BATES (memorial) 
FREDERICK P. FIsH 
WILLIAM AmMoRY GARDNER 
Jos—EPH CLARK HOPPIN 

Chicago 
HERBERT W. WOLFF 

Cincinnati 

CHARLES PHELPS TAFT 


Cleveland 
SAMUEL MATHER 


Detroit 
JoHn W. ANDERSON 
DEXTER M. FERRY, JR. 


Doylestown, Pennsylvania 
‘““A LovER OF GREECE AND 

ROME” 

New York 

Joun JAY CHAPMAN 
WILLARD V. KING 
Tuomas W. LAMONT 
Dwicut W. Morrow 
Mrs. D. W. Morrow 
ExraHu Root 
Mortimer L. SCHIFF 
WILLIAM SLOANE 
GroRGE W. WICKERSHAM 
And one contributor, who 

has asked to have his name 

withheld: 
Maecenas atavis edite regibus, 
O et praesidium et dulce decus 
meun. 

Washington 

The Greek Embassy at 
Washington, for the Greek 
Government. 


[ i | 






MY THOLO 


BY ee 

JANE ELLEN HARRISON 
HON. LL.D. (ABERDEEN), HON. D. LITT. (DURHAM) 
Sometime Fellow and Lecturer of Newnham College, Cambridge 





MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
BOSTON - MASSACHUSETTS 


COPYRIGHT*1924°BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 


All rights reserved 


Printed November, 1924 


THE PLIMPTON PRESS * NORWOOD * MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


EDITORS’ PREFACE 


HAT is Our Debt to Greek My- 
thology? 

It is to the answer to this ques- 
tion that Miss Harrison has addressed herself 
in this volume. 

The answer to the question involves a 
knowledge of the origins of Greek religion, for 
out of these eventually came that transforma- 
tion of belief for which Greek imagination 
was responsible in such a brilliant manner. 

What is characteristically Greek is not the 
original, crude material of religion which the 
Greeks had in common with many other peo- 
ples, but their method of handling it. This 
originality displayed itself in their mythology, 
no less than in their art and philosophy, and the 
great result was an expulsion of fear, through 
a sensitive sense that lent beauty to the Un- 
seen. 

As Miss Harrison has said, elsewhere: “It 
is the peculiar merit of Greek religion that 


ie 


EDITORS’ PREFACE 


from the outset, as we know it, these elements 
of license and monstrosity, the outcome of 
ignorance and fear, were caught, controlled, 
transformed by two things—by a poetry whose 
characteristic it was to be civilized as well as 
simple, and by a philosophy that was always 
more than half poetry. For the Greeks, the 
darkness and the dread of the Unseen was 
lighted, purified, quieted by two lamps— 
Reason and Beauty.” 

This Debt has been caught up in subsequent 
poetry and art and it permeates European lit- 
erature from the times of the Greek poets, 
through Virgil and Ovid, to our own time. 

The bibliography will give clues to the bor- 
rowings that have resulted. This book treats 
the subject of influence in the broadest fashion, 
giving the underlying principle that has again 
and again operated in specific cases and which 
is likely to exert a profound influence upon our 
own religious beliefs of to-day. 


[vi ] 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


CoNTRIBUTORS TO THE FuND.. . 
EDITORSG UREFACE . fot) oe 
INTRODUCTION (Wt. 2.01. sfc rent 

TREE ER MES il Ca ee se i ncuneepeatoM 
LM OSE IDON ie ainsi icone) sev anion 
III. THe Mountain-MorTHER... . 
Tee Pe Gorzones si uceru avin 

1. The Erinyes-Eumenides . . . 

IV. DEMETER AND Kore: THE Eartu- 
MoTHER AND THE EartTH-MAIDEN 

V. Tue Marmen-Goppesses as GIFT- 


PeSELCLAU Ie koe eee 

TIA CHET al ice i atscah aC ene 

11. Aphrodite and Eros. . . . 

VIER ARTEMISHRMMOr yon ecu) Che uneamity 
VALTER APOLLO Miya e wei a oc aN eee 


PAGE 


10! 
112 
128 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
VEL Dionysus, ac eee a neo. 1S tea 
EXO BUS 2055 V2 VC Ee eR Ve Dee cdie ok Sameera 
Conctusion )Umueont i) Woy incrtetaeras 
NOTES!) yg ek ho 2) a) 


BIBLIOGRAPHY aa apeiad tts. Cs 11 nee 


[ viii] 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


FIGURE 

HeERMES AS HERM . 
POSEIDON AS HORSE-GOD. 
POSEIDON AS BULL-GOD . 
Tue MovuntTAIN-MOTHER . 


mp eyo 


APHRODITE AND EROTES . 


Lix ] 





INTRODUCTION 


E are all Greeks,” says Shelley, in 
words thrice memorable, “our 
laws, our religion, our art, have 

their roots in Greece.” ‘True, but with one 
large deduction. Our religion is not rooted in 
Greece; it comes to us from the East, though 
upon it, too, the spirit of the West and of 
Greece itself has breathed. What Greece 
touches she transforms. Our religion, Ori- 
ental as it is in origin, owes to Greece a deep 
and lasting debt. To formulate this debt— 
this is the pleasant task that lies before us. 
But first we must note clearly, our subject 
is not Greek and Roman religion but Greek 
and Roman mythology. Each and every re- 
ligion contains two elements, Ritual and My- 
thology. We have first what a man does in re- 
lation to his religion, i. e., his Ritual; then what 
he thinks and imagines, i.e., his Mythology, 
or, if we prefer so to call it, his Theology. 
Both what he does and what he thinks are 
alike informed and vivified by what he feels, 


[xi ] 


INTRODUCTION 


what he desires. Psychology teaches us—and 
here we cannot do better than quote Professor 
Leuba—that the unit of conscious life is 
neither thought, nor feeling, nor will, in sepa- 
ration, but “all three in movement towards an 
object.””’ But it must further be noted that 
the will is primal. ‘Conscious life is always 
orientated towards something to be secured 
or avoided immediately or ultimately.” Re- 
ligion, then, is only one particular form of the 
activities of conscious life. The religious im- 
pulse is directed to one end and one only, the 
conservation and promotion of life. This end 
it attains in two ways, one negative, by the rid- 
dance of whatever is hostile, one positive, by 
the impulsion of whatever is favourable to life. 
All the world over, religious rites are of two 
kinds, of expulsion and impulsion. Hunger 
and barrenness are the two first foes to man’s 
life; these he seeks to expel. Food and fertil- 
ity are his two primal goods. The Hebrew 
word for “good” meant primarily “good to 
eat.” Food and fertility he seeks to impel, to - 
secure. Winter he drives out, spring and 
summer he brings in. 

This primitive religious activity, these rites 
of expulsion and impulsion, this ‘will to live” 


[ xii ] 


INTRODUCTION 


in all its manifestations is world-wide; Greeks 
and Romans share it with Red Indians and 
South Sea Islanders. What then is it that is 
characteristically Greek or Roman? Wherein 
lies our debt? This brings us to the other 
side or phase or aspect of religion, to My- 
thology. 


While man is carrying out his ritual, prac- 
tising his rites of expulsion or impulsion, he 
is also thinking or imagining; some sort of 
image, however vague, rises up in his mind, 
some mental picture, some imago of what he is 
doing and feeling. Why does such an image 
arise? Here psychology steps in to help us. 

Man is essentially an image-maker, but it 
is his human prerogative. In most animals, 
who act from what we call instinct, action fol- 
lows on perception mechanically with almost 
chemical swiftness and certainty. In man the 
nervous system is more complicated, percep- 
tion is not instantly transformed into reaction, 
there seems to be an interval for choice. It 
is just in this momentary pause between per- 
ception and reaction that our images, 7. e., our 
imaginations, our ideas, in fact our whole men- 
tal life is built up. We do not immediately 


[ xiii ] 


INTRODUCTION 


react, i.e., we do not immediately get what 
we want, so we figure the want to ourselves, 
we create an image. If reaction were instant 
we should have no image, no representation, 
no art, no theology. The clearness, the vivid- 
ness of the image will depend on the natural 
gifts of the image-maker. In one man’s re- 
action the image will be dim, confused, non- 
arresting; in another it will be clear, vivid, 
forceful. It was the supreme genius of the 
Greeks as contrasted with the Romans that 
they were image-makers, iconists. In Greek 
mythology, we have enshrined the images fash- 
ioned by the most gifted people the world has 
ever seen, and these images are the outcome, 
the reflection of that people’s unsatisfied 
desire. 


Some decades ago it was usual to call Greek 
gods by Roman names. For Athena we said 
Minerva, for Eros Cupid, for Poseidon Nep- 
tune. This baleful custom is now happily 
dead. We now know that till they borrowed 
them from the Greeks the Romans never had 
in the strict sense of the word any gods at all. 
They had vague demonic beings, impersonal, 
ill defined and these beings they called not dez 


[ xiv | 


INTRODUCTION 


(gods) but numina (powers). The Romans 
in the strict sense were never iconists, such 
was not the genius of their race; they did not 
personify, did not create personalities, hence 
they could not tell stories about persons, could 
not create myths; they had little or no my- 
thology. 

The Roman numen is devoid of human char- 
acteristics. He has not even sex, or at least 
his sex is indeterminate. How indefinite the 
numen is, is seen in the old prayer formula in 
which appeal is made to spirits, sve mas sive 
femina “whether he be male or female.” 
These vague spirits or numina were associated 
with particular places and were ‘regarded with 
vague feelings of awe inclining towards fear 
rather than love. The real specialization of 
the numen was not in his character but in his 
function, this area of action was carefully cir- 
cumscribed; he presided over some particular 
locality and activity of man, and the numina 
were almost as numerous as the activities. 
Thus there is Cunina who guards the child’s 
cradle, Edulia and Potina who teach him to 
eat and drink, Statilinus who makes him stand 
up and so on. In fact the numen is only 
the image of an activity, he is never a per- 


[ xv ] 


INTRODUCTION 


sonality though he may be the first stage to 
impersonation. 

If then the numina were superhuman, if 
they were in a sense lords over the Roman’s 
life, if they inspired religio, awe and a sense 
of obligation, they were never human and of 
them there were no human-shaped, no an- 
thropomorphic representations either in poetry 
or plastic art. Varro tells us—and we could 
have no better authority—that “for 170 years” 
(dating from the foundations of the city in 
753 B.c.) “the Romans worshipped their gods 
without images.”” He adds—and the comment 
is curiously one-sided and thoroughly Roman: 
“those who introduced representation among 
the nations, took away fear and brought in 
falsehood.” It was undeniably one supreme 
merit of the Greeks that from religion they 
took away fear. To the purely practical man 
the iconist is apt to seem a liar. 

The Greeks themselves were in part con- 
scious that they were iconists. One of the 
greatest of the sons of Greece has told us in 
simple words something of how the images 
were made and who were the image-makers. 
Herodotus has left us this statement, Hero- 
dotus who under the stimulus of foreign travel 


[ xvi | 


INTRODUCTION 


and especially a visit to Egypt had come to 
reflect on the characteristics of his own re- 
ligion. He writes (II. 53): 


“But as to the origin of each particular god, 
whether they all existed from the beginning, 
what were their individual forms, the knowl- 
edge of these things is, so to speak, but of to- 
day and yesterday. For Homer and Hesiod 
are my seniors, I think, by some four hundred 
years and not more. And it is they who have 
composed for the Greeks the generations of 
the gods, and have given to the gods their 
titles and distinguished their several provinces 
and special powers and marked their forms.” 


Herodotus did not and could not know that 
the gods were the outcome, the utterance of 
human desire projected by rites of expulsion 
and impulsion. What he did know, thanks to 
his comparative studies, was that the Greek 
gods were a comparatively late product and 
that these personal, accomplished gods had 
been preceded by an earlier stage in which the 
gods were not in the Greek sense gods at all, 
not distinct personalities with characteristic 
attributes and life-histories, but shadowy, 


Peyin' | 


INTRODUCTION 


nameless powers more like the Latin numina. 
He knows of a race inhabiting Greece before 
Homer’s days, and their gods, if gods they are 
to be called, are in marked contrast to those 
of Homer. “Formerly,” he says, “the Pelas- 
gians, on all occasions of sacrifice, called upon 
gods—but they gave them no title nor yet any 
name to any of them.” 

The primitive Pelasgians, equally with the 
more civilized Greeks, worshipped some form 
of divinity, they “offered sacrifice,’ they had 
ritual. But of what they sacrificed to, they 
had no clear conception. Their divinities were 
not individualized, they had not human forms, 
they were not called by proper names such 
as Zeus and Athena, they were not even ad- 
dressed by descriptive titles such as the “Loud 
Thunderer” or the “Grey-eyed One,” they 
were more like Things or Powers than Persons. 
Comparative religion shows us that, as He- 
rodotus first observed about the Greeks, so 
everywhere it is true that man only at a late 
stage attributes complete personality to the 
thing he worships. Personality comes with 
the giving of animal or human form. Before 
anthropomorphism (human form), before 
theriomorphism (beast form) we have a stage 

[ xvili ] 


INTRODUCTION 


of animism when the gods are intangible forces 
dwelling anywhere and everywhere. They be- 
come real gods when man localizes them, gives 
them definite form and enters into fixed rela- 
tions with them. Then only, when from 
Powers they become Persons, can they have a 
Mythology. 

Into the causes that led to complete imper- 
sonation we shall not now enter. Some of 
them will appear in the course of our examina- 
tion of the individual gods. What is impor- 
tant for the moment to note is that only when 
a god becomes a god in the full sense 7.e., a 
Person, can a life-history, a myth, be made. 
Our business is with mythology. The Pelas- 
gian divinities were impersonal, they had no 
myths; the same is true of the Roman numina. 
They were impersonal and had no myths. 
What is known as Roman mythology, the 
mythology, e.g., of Ovid, is only Greek my- 
thology transplanted and transformed into a 
Roman medium. Our debt to Roman my- 
thology is soon acknowledged and promptly dis- 
charged, for it is practically nil. Roman 
mythology as contrasted with Roman ritual is 
non-existent. The Romans were deeply re- 
ligious, deeply conscious of their obligation to 

Fes | 


INTRODUCTION 


the unseen; but they were not iconists, image- 
makers, mythologists, until late times and un- 
der Greek influence. The genius of their race 
forbade. 

“The gods,” says Herodotus, “were com- 
posed by Homer and Hesiod.” The poets 
gave to them their titles, their special powers, 
their forms. To Herodotus Homer was a 
single person; to us Homer is the whole Epic 
tradition, the ‘traditional book” of the early 
Greeks, of a people of poets. The Greeks were 
not priest-ridden, they were poet-ridden, a peo- 
ple, as the word poet implies, of makers, 
shapers, artists. They started with the same 
religious material as other races, with fear of 
the unseen, with fetish worship, with unsatis- 
fied desire, and out of this vague and crude 
material they fashioned their Immortals, such 
as Hermes, Poseidon, Demeter, Hera, Athena, 
Aphrodite, Artemis, Apollo, Dionysus, Zeus. 


JANE ELLEN HARRISON 


American Women’s University Club, 
4 rue de Chevreuse, Paris. 


[ xx ] 


— _ 


MYTHOLOGY 


Wie kh Oe Gt eae i Ant Sih rdand pi’ 
PLT Bo UN Steyr) A NOPE 





PE aly Van 








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MYTHOLOGY 


I. HERMES 


E shall begin with a lesser Olym- 
pian, with Hermes. Let us see 
him first with Homer’s eyes. In 

the Odyssey, Zeus summons Hermes and bids 
him go to the island of Calypso: 


“He spake: nor did the fleetfoot, Shining One 
Fail of obedience, but at once laced on 
Beneath his feet the wnperishable fair 
Sandals of gold, that when he would be gone 


Over the wet sea or the boundless land 

Bore im like blowing wind, and took in hand 
The rod wherewith he charms men’s eyes to sleep 
Or makes the sleeper to awake and stand: 


Holding it now, the Shining One with might 
Took wing, and mounting the Pierian height 
Out of the sky on ocean darted down 

And swift across the billows urged his flight 


[3] 


MYTHOLOGY 


As a sea-eagle that his finny prey 

Chases, his thickest plumage wet with spray, 
Through the dread gulfs of sea unharvested, 
Over the thronging waves he sped his way.” + 


Again and again Homer shows us the bright 
young messenger-god. He comes to rescue 
Odysseus from the fatal house of Circe and 
gives him the magic herb moly to release him 
from her spells: 


“So saying from the ship-side and the sea 
Inland I went alone, and presently 

Up the enchanted glades I drew anigh 
To the great house of Circe’s sorcery. 


But, as I drew anigh it, in that place 
Gold-wanded Hermes met me face to face 
In likeness of a youth when the first down 
Fledges his lip in earliest manhood’s grace,” 


he utters his warning: 


“So spake the Shining One, and forthwith drew 
Out of the earth that drug, and in my hand 
Laid it, and shewed me in what sort it grew. 


Black was the root, the blossom milky white 
And the gods call it moly: mortal wight 


[4] 





HERMES 


Would have hard work to dig it from the 
ground; 

Howbeit the power of gods is infinite.” ? 
Such is the Hermes we know, the Hermes wor- 
shipped by the later Greeks, the Hermes “‘com- 
posed” by Homer. A goodly icon, a fair image 
indeed! What were the materials that went 
to his fashioning? 

The answer to this question is a surprise, 
almost a shock. It comes to us from the an- 
tiquarian Pausanias, who, in the second cen- 
tury A.D., travelled ali over Greece and has 
left us his note-book. Happily he was a man 
for whom things ancient, even if uncouth and 
grotesque, had special charm. At Phare in 
Achza, Pausanias (VII. 22. 2) saw an image 
of Hermes, the Market god. It was of square 
shape, surmounted by a head with a beard. 
It was of no great size. In front of it was a 
hearth made of stone with bronze lamps 
clamped to it with lead. Beside it an oracle 
is established. He who would consult the 
oracle comes at evening, burns incense on the 
hearth, lights the lamps, lays a coin of the 
country on the altar to the right of the image 
and whispers his question into the ear of the 


[5] 


MYTHOLOGY 


god. Then he stops his ears and quits the 
market place, and when he is gone outside a 
little way, he uncovers his ears and whatever 
word he hears that he takes for an oracle. 

Hermes was then, to begin with, what his 
name might lead us to expect, a Herm, a rude 





Figure I 
Hermes as Herm 


pillar later surmounted by a head (Fig. 1). 
But not only Hermes began life as a Herm, 
all the other gods it would seem had the like 
lowly parentage. At Phare, close to the 
image of Hermes, Pausanias goes on to tell us, 
stood about thirty square stones; these the 
people of Phare revered “giving to each stone 
the name of a god.” And says Pausanias: “in 


the olden time all the Greeks worshipped un- 


[6] 


HERMES 


wrought stones instead of images.” At Thes- 
piz he elsewhere (IX. 27. 1) notes the most 
ancient image of Eros, the winged love-god, 
was “an unwrought stone.” At Orchomenus 
(IX. 38. 1) in Boeotia, where was a very an- 
cient sanctuary of the Charites or Grace- 
Givers, their images were stones that had 
fallen from heaven. 

The use of square-shaped images of Hermes, 
Pausanias in another part of his journal (IV. 
33. 4) says was first introduced by the Athe- 
nians who were zealous in all religious matters, 
and from Athens the usage passed to the rest 
of Greece. How dear and how hallowed were 
these square-shaped Herms was clearly seen 
by the horror and panic that ran through 
Athens when at the time of the fatal Sicilian 
expedition the Herme were sacrilegiously mu- 
tilated. The Arcadians, also a primitive peo- 
ple, were “‘specially fond” of the square-shaped 
Herm. At Megalopolis, Pausanias (VIII. 32. 
3) saw images of the gods made in square 
form and called Workers. The contrast be- 
tween the square herms and the human shaped 
Olympians evidently struck him, for he says: 
“Touching Hermes the poems of Homer have 
given currency to the report that he is the 


[7] 


MYTHOLOGY 


servant of Zeus and leads down to hell the 
souls of the departed.” 

We have seen Hermes in Homer as the mes- 
senger from heaven to earth; let us now see 
him as conductor of souls to Hades. 

The wooers in the halls of Odysseus are 
slain, Hermes comes to lead their souls to 
Hades. 


“Now Cyllenian Hermes called forth from 
the halls the souls of the wooers, and he held 
in his hand his wand that is fair and golden, 
wherewith he lulls the eyes of men, of whomso 
he will, while others again he even wakens out 
of sleep. Herewith he roused and led the souls 
who followed gibbering. And even as bats 
flit gibbering in the secret place of a won- 
drous cave, when one has fallen down out of 
the rock from the cluster, and they cling each 
to each up aloft, even so the souls gibbered as 
they fared together, and Hermes, the helper, 
led them down the dank ways.” ® 


Hermes is a square post, Hermes is a winged 
messenger. No contrast it would seem could 
be more complete, no functions more incom- 


[8] 


HERMES 


patible. The whole gist of the Herm is to re- 
main steadfast, the characteristic of the mes- 
senger is swift motion. The Herm’s modern 
brother, the Pillar-Box, would be quite use- 
less but for the aid of half-a-dozen postmen. 
The Greeks themselves felt the anomaly, the 
incompatibility of the two figures; it must have 
tried the faith of many a simple worshipper. 
Babrius, writing in the 2d or 3rd century A. D., 
in one of his fables makes the god himself 
voice the dilemma: was he a tombstone, was 
he an immortal? 


“A stonemason made a marble Herm for sale 
And men came up to bid. One wanted it 
For a tombstone, since lis son was lately dead. 
A craftsman wanted to set it up as a god. 

It was late, and the stonemason had not sold 


it yet. 

So he said, ‘Come early to-morrow and look at 
it again, 

He went to sleep and lo! in the gateway of 
dreams 


Hermes stood and said ‘My affairs now hang in 
the balance, 

Do make me one thing or another, dead man or 
god.’ 3) 


[9] 


MYTHOLOGY 


What then is the link that binds together 
Herm and winged messenger? How in a word 
did the.Hermes of Homer come to be “com- 
posed” out of the square shaped boundary 
stone? 

Within the limits of Greece I might have 
asked the question and never found the an- 
swer. Happily the comparative method is at 
hand to help and it is Russia this time that 
brings the solution. The burial rite of the 
Eastern Slavs is thus described in an ancient 
Chronicle. After a sort of “wake” had been 
held over the dead man, the body was burnt 
and the ashes, gathered together in a small 
urn, were set up on a pillar or herm where the 
boundaries of two properties met. The dead 
grandfather was the object of special rever- 
ence under the title of Tchur, which means in 
Russian either grandfather or boundary. In 
the Russian of to-day prashtchur means great- 
great-grandfather and Tchur menya means 
“may my grandfather preserve me.” On the 
other hand the offence of removing a legal 
landmark is expressed by the word ¢cherez- 
tchur which means ‘‘beyond the limit” or 
“beyond my grandfather.” The grandfather 
looked after the patriarchal family during his 


[10] 


HERMES 


life, he safeguarded its boundaries in death. 
His monument was at once tombstone and 
Term. 

Light begins to dawn. Hermes is at first 
just a Herm, a stone or pillar set up to com- 
memorate the dead. Into that pillar the 
mourner outpours, “projects” all his sorrow for 
the dead protector, all his passionate hope that 
the ghost will protect him still. When in the 
autumn he sows his seed, he buries it in the 
ground as he buried his dead father or grand- 
father, and he believes that the dead man takes 
care of it, fosters it in the underworld and 
sends it up to blossom in spring and to fruit 
in autumn. So the Herm became the guard- 
ian of his buried wealth and Hermes is Chari- 
dotes, Giver of Grace or Increase of all Good 
Luck. 

And more than this. In his lifetime a man 
went to his father or his grandfathers, to his 
elders for advice—surely they will not fail him 
now. So at night he steals to the Herm and 
asks his question. The Herm is dumb but the 
first chance word the man hears comes to him 
as an oracle from the dead. The dead are al- 
ways magical, they can prevail where the liv- 
ing fail, so on the Herm he figures the rkabdos 


[ir] 


MYTHOLOGY 


which is not a messenger’s staff, not a king’s 
sceptre but simply a magician’s wand. And 
about it he coils snakes for he has seen a snake 
coiling about the tomb, creeping out of it, and 
a snake is the symbol of the dead man. 

If the worshipper is an agriculturist his de- 
sire will be for his seeds and the Herm will 
be the guardian of his crops. But if he be a 
shepherd not less will he look to his dead an- 
cestor to be the guardian of his sheep, to make 
them be fruitful and multiply. So when the 
Herm gets a head and gradually becomes 
wholly humanized, among a pastoral people 
he carries on his shoulders a ram, and from 
the Ram Carrier, the Criophorus, Christianity 
has taken her Good Shepherd. 

But it is not only the seeds and the flocks 
that the dead ancestor must watch over. 
More important still, he is guardian of the 
young men, the children of his clan. He is 
child-rearer, Kourotrophos. And finally when 
he is translated to Olympus he still watches 
over the infant gods, and Praxiteles so fash- 
ions his image—‘Hermes carrying the child 
Dionysus.” 

How exactly the leap to Olympus was ac- 
complished we do not know. At some time 


[12] 





HERMES 


in Greek pre-history, owing to the movements 
of peoples and certainly before Homer, the 
Greek gods were assembled on the high peak 
of Mount Olympus in Thessaly, a peak that 
I have only seen shrouded in clouds. From 
the mountain peak to the sky transition was 
easy and natural. The old boundary-god, the 
steadfast Herm, had been the medium of com- 
munication with the ghosts below; it was nat- 
ural he should be the messenger of the gods 
above, only he must shift his shape. His feet, 
once rooted in the ground, are freed and fitted 
with winged sandals, his magician’s staff with 
its snakes he keeps, only now it has become 
a herald’s staff—and he himself has shed his 
age and is a young man “with the first down 
upon his cheek.” 

It is as the messenger that modern art and 
literature remember Hermes, the messenger 
and herald, 


“New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.’ 4 


[13] 


II. POSEIDON 


ERMES, beautiful, magical as he is, 
remains always a lesser, perhaps the 
least Olympian. We turn to an- 

other and a greater god second only to Zeus 
himself, Poseidon. What were the thoughts, 
the longings, the ideals enshrined by the 
Greeks in the figure of Poseidon? 

At first all seems simple and straightforward. 
Poseidon is the god of the sea, the sea incar- 
nate. In Homer, as Professor Gilbert Murray 
says, Poseidon “moves in a kind of rolling 
splendour.” Now as regards the other gods 
we have, too tardily, given up these simple, 
elemental interpretations. We no longer say 
that Athena is the Bright Sky or the Storm- 
Cloud, or that Hermes is the whistling wind. 
But Poseidon we are still apt to feel is in some 
special way “elemental.” It is perhaps be- 
cause, as Mr. Gladstone long ago pointed out, 
Poseidon is in Homer marked by an “absence 
of the higher elements of deity whether intel- 


[14] 


POSEIDON 


lectual or moral.” He is ‘“‘a vast force and al- 
most always a vindictive one.” The real rea- 
son of this will appear later. It is certainly 
not because Poseidon is the sea. The sea that 
laps the isles of Greece is friendly rather than 
destructive. 

If we would find the true answer we must 
ask the right question. To-day we no longer 
ask who was Poseidon? All of us, even the 
most orthodox agree that there never was, 
never could be a god Poseidon. There were 
images of the god, but no god. But though no 
god Poseidon was, there were worshippers of 
Poseidon, people who imagined the god, who 
made images of him and who were themselves 
influenced by these images. A god is an 
idolon, an imagined potency, his worshippers 
are actualities. It is not the god who creates 
the worshippers. It is the worshippers who, 
in their own image, create, project the image 
of the god. ‘An honest god’s the noblest 
work of man” remains the profoundest of 
parodies. 

The question then we ask now-a-days Is: 
Who and what were the worshippers of Posei- 
don? What was their environment? What 
—as the psychologists say—were their “‘reac- 


[15] 


MYTHOLOGY 


tions” to this environment? What their social! 
activities, their means first and foremost of 
earning their bread, what their hopes, their 
fears, their desires, their aspirations and how 
did these take shape in the figure of the god? 
In thinking of Poseidon as sea-god we must 
never forget that the Greek attitude of mind 
towards the sea was not ours. To us the sea 
is the highway of trade, the means of abundant 
profit and sustenance. To the Greek it was 
always ‘the unharvested” sea, a barren salt 
waste where he might not plough or sow. It 
yielded, however, one form of sustenance, fish, 
and the later Greeks, unlike the Homeric he- 
roes, were largely fish-eaters. Poseidon was 
not the sea incarnate, but he was the projec- 
tion of the hopes and desires of a fisher- 
people. This is certain from his trident, 
which at least by some was understood as the 
fisherman’s three-pronged spear. The Chorus 
in the Seven against Thebes (130) pray: “O 
thou Poseidon, steeded monarch who rules — 
the sea with fish-spearing trident, grant re- 
lease from our terrors,” and on a black-figured 
lecythus Poseidon is figured sitting quietly on 
a rock, a fish in one hand, his trident in the 
other, while his friends Heracles and Hermes 


[16] 





POSEIDON 


fish with other implements, line and basket. 

The chorus in the Seven against Thebes in- 
voke ‘‘steeded Poseidon,” Poseidon Hippius, 
God of the horses. It was Poseidon, Homer 
(I1., XXIII. 276) tells us, who gave to Peleus 
his immortal horses. But our most important 
evidence is the express testimony of the Ho- 
meric Hymn—as follows: 


“Twofold, Shaker of the Earth, is the meed 
of honour the gods have allotted thee, to be the 
‘Tamer of horses’ and the ‘Succour of Ships.” 


Here be it observed the horse-aspect even 
takes precedence of the sea aspect. Further, 
Pausanias (VII. 21. 9) tells us that Pamphus, 
who composed for the Athenians their most 
ancient hymns, says that Poseidon is 


“Giver of horses and of ships with spread sails.” 


In Athenian later literature two great hymns 
to Poseidon come instantly to mind, the chorus 
in Sophocles’ Edipus at Colonus and the hymn 
in the Knights of Aristophanes. In _ the 
Knights, Poseidon comes before Athena, for 
Poseidon was, as we shall later see, the god of 
the old aristocratic order. The Knights in- 
voke first and foremost 


[17] 


MYTHOLOGY 


“Dread Poseidon the horseman’s King,” 
and only second do they add, 
“Hail Athena, the warrior-Queen.” ® 


In the Gdipus at Colonus, at Colonus close to 
Athens, it is Athena and her olive tree who 
came first, but in the antistrophe we have: 


“Son of Kronos, Lord Poseidon, this our proud- 
est 1s from thee 

The strong horses, the young horses, the do- 
minton of the sea. | 

First on Attic roads thy bridle tamed the steed 
for evermore; 

And well swings at sea, a wonder in the rower’s 
hand, the oar 

Bounding after all the hundred Neretid feet that 
fly before.” ® 


It may perhaps at this point occur to some 
one to urge: This is mere poetry, why make 
a difficulty of it? The galloping, rearing 
horses are but racing, crested waves. Do we 
not still speak of the ‘‘white horses’? The 
objection might have some validity if it were 
in poetry only that Poseidon was Hippius, 


[18] 


POSEIDON 


Horseman, but it must be remembered that he 
is also so figured in art. On a fragment of 
7th century B.c. Corinthian pottery (Fig. 2) 
he is represented actually riding on a horse. 
In his left hand are the reins, in his right an 





Figure 2 
Poseidon as Horse-god 


attribute wholly irrelevant to the horseman, 
the trident fishing-spear. Moreover sacrifices 
of horses were solemnly made to Poseidon. 
In Illyria, every ninth year, Festus’ tells us, 
a yoke of four horses was sunk in the waters. 
And if Illyria seem a far cry, according to 
Pausanias (VIIi. 7. 2) the Argives of old 
threw horses, bitted and bridled, into Dione in 


[19] 


MYTHOLOGY 


honour of Poseidon. Dione was a freshwater 
spring at a place called Genethlium in Argolis, 
so here there is no question of ‘‘white horses” 
and the galloping sea waves. 

At Onchestus in Beotia, remote from the 
sea, we find again Poseidon as Lord of horses. 
In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (230) we are 
told how the god in his journeying came to 
Onchestus “the bright grove of Poseidon.” 
What is the sea-god doing with a grove? 
“There the new broken colt takes breath again, 
weary though he be with dragging the goodly 
chariot: and to earth, skilled though he be, 
leaps down the charioteer and fares on foot, 
while the horses for a while rattle along the 
empty car with the reins on their necks, and, 
if the car be broken in the grove of trees, 
their masters tend them there, and tilt the car 
and let it lie. Such is the rite from of old 
and they pray to the King Poseidon while the 
chariot is the god’s to keep.” 

Commentators have broken their heads in 
the attempt to fix the exact nature of the rite. 
The details are certainly not clear but this 
much is beyond question; we have a rite of 
horse and chariot-driving sacred from early 
days to Poseidon. The title by which the god 


[20] 


POSEIDON 


is addressed, King (Anax), marks its antiq- 
uity. Onchestus was a great religious centre 
in the time of Homer. Strabo (IX. 31. 412) 
tells us that the Ampnictyonic Council usually 
assembled there, but in his days it was bare 
of trees. Poseidon’s “bright grove’? must have 
faded and fallen. 

Poseidon then so far is fisherman and horse- 
man. Strange and incompatible enough are 
the two functions, but a stranger fact still re- 
mains to be faced. He is not only fisherman 
and horseman; he is bull-man. 


On a black figured amphora in the museum 
at Wurzburg (Fig. 3) we have Poseidon fig- 
ured in curious guise. He, Lord of the “un- 
harvested” sea, holds in his right hand, with 
singular irrelevance, a great blossoming bough 
and he is seated on a bull. His left hand 
grasps a fish and behind him vaguely unat- 
tached is his trident. The god has so many 
attributes he cannot hold them all. He is a 
bundle of incongruities. What has the bull- 
god to do with the sea and the trident? What 
relation has the salt sea fish to the blossom- 
ing bough? The mythologist of by-gone days 
was hard put to it for an explanation; he was 


[21] 


MYTHOLOGY 


driven into all sorts of holes and corners to 
fit in the pieces of the puzzle. Poseidon he 





Figure 3 
Poseidon as Bull-god 


said had a title, Phytalmius, He-of-the-Growth. 
Poseidon was the god of fresh water as well as 
of the sea and so on. We shall see in a mo- 


[22] 


POSEIDON 


ment that by the new method which views the 
god not as a Separate entity but as a projection 
of his worshippers no ingenuity is needed, the 
riddle solves itself. 

But first the Bull-aspect of Poseidon must 
be more clearly established. A single vase- 
painting is not adequate. One of Poseidon’s 
standing epithets was Taureus. In Hesiod’s 
Shield (103) Heracles says to the young 
Iolaus: “Young man, greatly in sooth doth 
the Father of Gods and men honour thy head, 
yea and the Bull-God, the Earth-Shaker.” 
The scholiast after his kind suggests that the 
god is called Taureus because the sea roars 
and bulls roar. His second thoughts are hap- 
pier. It is the Bootian way he says to call 
the god Taureus because bulls are sacrificed 
to Poseidon, specially at Onchestus. Or, he 
adds, is it that Poseidon had a bull’s head? 
One thing is abundantly clear, the scholiast 
did not know. 

The animal on which a god stands or rides 
or whose head he wears is, it is now accepted, 
the primitive animal form of the god. Posei- 
don then had once for his animal form a horse 
and also it would seem a bull. The bull was 
in the fullest sense his ve/icle, his carrier. As 


[23] 


MYTHOLOGY 


the god has himself no actuality, as there is 
no god, his worshippers choose something, 
some plant or animal or man to be the vehicle 
of their desires, to represent the god they have 
projected. Now a bull is often thus chosen 
by a people of agriculturists, he is a splendid 
symbol and vehicle of that intense and vigor- 
ous life they feel without and within them; so 
is the horse to a people of horse-rearers. 
Later when the worshipper is less impressed 
by the life around him, when he gains the mas- 
tery over these strong, splendid animals. and 
comes to trust only or mainly in his own strong 
right arm, the godhead of the sacred animal 
dwindles and the worshippers become shy of a 
bull-god or a horse-god. 

But in poetry the godhead of the animal lin- 
gers, and especially the terror and the divinity 
of the Bull remains. It lives on in the story 
of the death of Hippolytus. Theseus, the 
father of Hippolytus, is son of Poseidon and 
Poseidon has granted him the boon that thrice 
his prayer shall be granted. When Theseus 
curses the innocent Hippolytus he says: 


“and by Poseidon’s breath 
He shall fall swiftly to the house of Death.” 


[24] 


POSEIDON 


Hippolytus is driving his chariot by the sea- 
shore when the curse falls; he has reached 
Saronis Gulf: 


“Just there an angry sound, 

Slow swelling, like God’s thunder underground, 

Broke on us, and we trembled. And the steeds 

Pricked thew ears skyward, and threw back their 
heads. 

And wonder came on all men, and affright, 
Whence rose that awful voice. And swift our 
sight | 
Turned seaward, down the salt and roaring sand.” 


A great crested wave rose and broke and 
swept towards the car of Hippolytus: 


“Three lines of wave together raced, and, full 
In the white crest of them, a wild Sea-Bull 
Flung to the shore, a fell and marvellous Thing. 
The whole land held his voice, and answering 
Roared in each echo.” 


The horses maddened race:along the sand. In 
vain Hippolytus tries to check and turn them, 


“For when he veered them round, 
And aimed their flying feet to grassy ground, 
In front uprose that Thing, and turned again 


[25] 


MYTHOLOGY 


The four great coursers, terror mad. But when 

Their blind rage drove them toward the rocky 
places, 

Silent, and ever nearer to the traces, 

It followed.” ® 


A “great Sea-Bull”— There is no such thing. 
That portent born of the sea, that edges in 
awful silence up to the chariot is the god him- 
self, the imagined terror, and the thunder 
marks his divine Epiphany. 


Poseidon then is fisherman-god, horse-god, 
bull-god. Finally we must never forget that 
though he is not the sea-incarnate, he is not 
elemental, he is ruler of the sea, pontomedon 
as the Greeks called him, thalassocrat as we 
should say to-day. These various and con- 
tradictory aspects so puzzling to the old 
method of mythology are clear enough once 
we adopt the new, once we state the god in 
terms of his worshippers: Poseidon fisher- 
god, horse-god, god of the blossoming bough, 
bull-god. Finally we must never forget that 
imagined idolon of a people of fishermen, 
traders, horsemen, agriculturists, bull-rearers, 
thalassocrats. Now all these functions we of 


[26] 


POSEIDON 


the Anglo-Saxon race combine ourselves, we 
are a fisher-people, we are agriculturists, horse- 
rearers, breeders of fat-cattle, thalassocrats. 
Poseidon, Hippius, Taureus, Pontomedon 
might have been projected by ourselves. 

But the question before us is, whether there 
was in antiquity a people fishermen, agricul- 
turists, horse-rearers, thalassocrats who ac- 
tually worshipped the bull. The word thalas- 
socrat, ruler of the sea, instantly reminds us 
that the Cretan Minos was the first of the 
thalassocrats. His god was the Minotaur, the 
Minos-Bull. The god Poseidon is primarily 
and in essence none other than the Cretan 
Minotaur. 

Observe we say “primarily.” Ultimately 
Poseidon was very much more and also a good 
deal less than the Minotaur. I offer, not an 
equation but certain steps in an evolution. 
I would guard my somewhat alarming state- 
ment carefully. The Minotaur is noé identical 
with Poseidon, rather he is the point de repére 
about which the complex figure of Poseidon 
slowly crystallizes. Beginning as an island 
holy bull, worshipped by a population of fisher- 
men, agriculturists, and herdsmen, he devel- 
oped with his people. As Minotaur he spread 


[27] 


MYTHOLOGY 


his dominion across the islands and the sea to 
Greece proper. There, shedding his horns and 
hooves, he climbed at last to the snow-clad 
heights of Olympus. Where and when he got 
his new name of Poseidon, which in all prob- 
ability means Lord of Moisture, we cannot cer- 
tainly say. 

Let us seek the Bull-God at home in Crete. 
The Minotaur is of all mythological figures 
most familiar, though so long misunderstood. 
The palace of Cnossus is full of the Holy Bull; 
his Horns of Consecration are everywhere, the 
whole palace is his Labyrinth. The Minotaur 
to us has become a cruel master, calling every 
seventh year for his toll of victims, Athenian 
youths and maidens. This is because his fig- 
ure is presented to us distorted by Athenian 
chauvinism. But on the Cretan sealing, dis- 
covered by Sir Arthur Evans, the Minotaur 
is no monster to be slain. He is a King-God 
and he is seated on a primitive throne, the fold- 
ing stool in use among the ancients. Just such 
a folding stool, made by Dedalus of Crete, 
was preserved as a monument of the ancient 
kings in the Erechtheum at Athens. The head 
of the monster is indistinct but of his divine 
Bull’s tail curling up behind his throne there 


[28] 





POSEIDON 


is no doubt. In front of him stands a wor- 
shipper in adoration. So is it always, to your 
own worshippers you are a god; to the con- 
querors of those worshippers, who project their 
own hate, you are a monster, a devil. 

What precisely was the Minotaur? For- 
tunately we know from the evidence of count- 
less vases exactly how he was figured. He was 
a man with a bull’s head and bull’s hooves. 
Now there is no such thing as a man, an actual 
living man with a bull’s head and hooves. Is 
the Minotaur then a fancy monster or what 
is the reality behind? What is the Minotaur 
in terms of his worshippers? ‘The answer is 
clear, certain, illuminating. The Minotaur is 
one of his own worshippers, a royal wor- 
shipper, wearing a ritual mask, a bull’s head 
and horns and possibly though not certainly, a 
bull’s hide. In Egypt, Diodorus (1. 62) tells 
us it was the custom in the ruling house to 
put on the head the foreparts of lions, bulls 
and snakes as tokens of royal dominion. Sir 
Arthur Evans kindly tells me that the ritual 
form of the Minotaur, as bull-headed man, 
can, he believes, be traced right back to the 
hieroglyphs of Egypt. The Minotaur is but 
King Minos masking as a Bull. The object 


[29] 


MYTHOLOGY 


is, of course, that the royal functionary as rep- 
resentative of the whole state may get for it 
the force, the mana of the holy animal, that 
like Hannah his “horn may be exalted.” As 
to this ritual actuality of the Minotaur it is 
sometimes objected that the Minotaur may be 
merely a phantastic hybrid form, like the man- 
headed bulls who are frequently figured on 
coins as river-gods. But, mark the difference. 
A bull with a man’s face or bust is a mere 
fancy, pure mythology with no ritual counter- 
part. Sophocles so imagined the great river 
Acheloiis. He makes the maiden Deianira 
say: 


“A river was my lover, him I mean 
Great Acheloiis, and in threefold form 
Wooed me and wooed again: a visible bull 
Sometimes, and sometimes a coiled gleaming 
snake, 
And sometimes partly man, a monstrous shape 
Bull-fronted, and adown his shaggy beard 
Fountains of clear spring water glistening 
owed.” ® 


Such a figure has no ritual counterpart in ac- 
tual life. Bulls do not go about masquerading 
as men to win the mana of men. A beast’s 


[30] 





POSEIDON 


lack of “free motor images,” as the psycholo- 
gists say, restrains him alike from the follies 
of magic and the splendours of religion. He 
has “too much sense,” 7.e., he is too closely 
bound by the experimental method. But a 
man with a bull’s mask is not a fancy, it is a 
ritual reality. It was a ritual reality in the 
days of King Minos. It is to-day. A last 
survival of the custom may be seen among the 
Berkshire morris-dancers. The masqueraders 
no longer actually wear the Bull’s head, but 
they carry it aloft on a pole. 

At Ephesus the young men who poured out 
the wine at the festival of Poseidon were, 
Athenaeus (p. 425e.) tells us, called tauroi, 
bulls. In the light of the bull-masqueraders 
the title becomes clear. The “asses’ ears’ of 
Midas rest on a folk-tale, accounting for a 
similar ritual, imperfectly understood. Midas 
is a priest-dynast like Minos but he presides 
Over an ass-worshipping tribe. The folk-tale 
of the man with animal ears or horns is world- 
wide and has probably everywhere a ritual 
origin. The wearing of horns and animal ears 
was first misunderstood, then, often, moralized; 
it was turned into a penalty for some act of 
hybris of overweening pride and insolence, but 


[31] 


MYTHOLOGY 


the real original kybris lay in the worshipper’s 
effort to gain the fertility of the animal which 
was worshipped. 

The sign of kingship and the kingdom in 
Crete, the ‘mascot’ as we should call it, was, 
it would seem, the bull, just as the mascot of 
the kingdom of Athens was the Golden Lamb. 
King Minos, Apollodorus (III. 1. 3) tells us, 
wished to obtain the kingdom; so he prayed 
that a bull should appear to him. To whom 
did he pray? Whence came the bull? He 
prayed to Poseidon and Poseidon sent him up 
from the deep a magnificent bull; so Minos 
got the kingdom. The coming of the bull 
from the depths of the sea is like the coming 
of the bull for the destruction of Hippolytus. 
It is so manifestly non-natural that it must be 
based on very ancient tradition. 

The fabulous island of Atlantis described 
for us in the Critias of Plato has been, we 
think correctly, identified with Crete. Crete 
after her great splendour sunk for generations 
into almost total obscurity. The island of At- 
lantis Plato tells belonged to Poseidon. When 
the gods divided up the world Poseidon re- 
ceived for his lot the island of Atlantis and he 
begat children and settled them in a certain 


[32] 





POSEIDON 


part of the island. It is interesting to find 
that the bull-service of Poseidon described in 
the Critzas has very close analogies to the bull- 
service Of Minoan Crete. It is as follows: 
Poseidon, says Plato, gave laws to the first 
men of Atlantis and these laws they inscribed 
on pillars in the god’s precinct and pledged 
themselves to their maintenance. It must 
never be forgotten that Minos was according 
to Greek tradition the first Lawgiver, and as 
Lawgiver he lived on, ‘“‘uttering dooms” to the 
dead men in Hades. 

The ritual of the pledge to maintain the 
laws was on this wise. There were certain 
bulls allowed to range free in the sanctuary of 
Poseidon. The Kings hunted these bulls with- 
out weapons, using staves and nooses. Again 
be it remembered, the bull hunts and bull 
fights of the Minoans appear on many a fresco 
and gem at Cnossus. When a bull was caught, 
it was led up to the column and its blood was 
shed over the inscription. The blood of the 
victim, mixed with wine, was then drunk and 
curses invoked on those who. disobeyed the 
laws. The remarkable analogy here is not 
the mere sacrifice of the bull but the conjunc- 
tion of bull and pillar in Atlantis and the con- 


[33] 


MYTHOLOGY 


junction of bull and pillar in Crete. On the 
frescoed shrines of Cnossus the holy pillar 
rises straight out of the “horns of consecra- 
tion.” On the famous Hagia Triada Sarcoph- 
agus we have indeed no direct certainty that 
the blood of the sacrificed bull is actually ap- 
plied to the pillar but the close conjunction 
of the two, sacrificed bull and pillar, makes 
it highly probable. Anyhow our main point 
is clear. Plato could hardly have imagined 
a ritual so strange and complex. It must be 
traditional and its origin is to be sought in the 
ritual of the bull-Poseidon in Crete. 

The holy bull of Crete was the symbol, the 
surrogate of a greater power than himself. 
He had another name than that of Minotaur, 
he was also called Talos. Talos is most fa- 
miliar to us as the brazen man who guarded 
Crete, circling round the island three times 
a day. Minos when he married Pasiphaé, the 
All Shining One, received from Hephestus, 
Apollodorus (I. 9. 1) tells us, the brazen man 
Talos as a wedding-gift. Hesychius says that 
Talos means the sun, and Apollodorus (I. 9. 
26), when telling how the Argonauts came to 
Crete, says: “Talos was a brazen man but 
some say he was a bull.” ‘Talos only concerns 


[34] 


aXe —— ——— 


POSEIDON 


us in so far as he was a bull, the animal vehicle 
of the sun and obviously but another name for 
the Minotaur, son of Asterion (the Spangled 
One) with his solar labyrinth. Talos appears 
on the coins of Crete sometimes in the form 
of a butting bull, sometimes as a man holding 
in his hand like the Minotaur a stone, the sym- 
bol of the sun. The sun connection of the 
Minos-bull and Poseidon is worth noting, for 
it will be remembered it was Poseidon who took 
vengeance on Odysseus for his outrage on 
the kine of the Sun-god. 

We have tracked the bull-god home to 
Crete. The Minotaur, the Minos-bull, stands 
to us henceforth for all the splendour of the 
Minoan civilization. Poseidon Pontomedon is 
Minos the thalassocrat. He stands for a cul- 
ture that in Greece was pre-historic. This 
explains much. In Homer, Poseidon claims 
equality with Zeus. He is obliged to yield 
to his brother’s supremacy but he is always 
a malcontent and often in open rebellion, per- 
sistently vindictive. He is connected always 
with the impious and outrageous giants; the 
Cyclopes, a godless race, are his children. In 
the Odyssey, we learn that these Cyclopes took 
no heed of Zeus. Odysseus appeals fcr mercy 


[35] 


MYTHOLOGY 


and hospitality in the name of Zeus, god of 
strangers, and the Cyclops makes answer: 


“Belike a fool are you, 
O stranger, or - from far away have come, 
Who bid me fear or shun what gods can do. 


For the Cyclopes heed of Zeus have none 

The Thunder-bearer nor of any one 

Of the high gods: too strong are we by far.” 
And when Odysseus has blinded the one NG 
of the Cyclops, he says to him: 


“Then to your father, Lord Poseidon, pray 
To heal you.” 1° 


It was this antipathy to Zeus and this aloof- 
ness from the Olympian assembly that made 
Mr. Gladstone long ago in his monumental 
Juventus Mundi divine that Poseidon was in 
some sense a foreigner. Casting about for a 
maritime people known to the Greeks he hit 
unhappily on the Phoenicians. The Minoan 
civilization in his days lay buried deep and 
forgotten in Crete. Had Mr. Gladstone lived 
to-day, I doubt not that he would have been 


[36] 





POSEIDON 


the first to hail the Minotaur as Poseidon’s 
prototype. 

It may be noted here that on the mainland 
Poseidon is often and indeed almost always a 
beaten god. He contends with Hera for Ar- 
gos, with Helios for Corinth, with Zeus for 
AXgina, with Dionysus for Naxos; he was 
forced to exchange Delphi for Calaureia with 
Apollo, and Delos for Tznarum with Leto. 
In all cases he was worsted; only at Athens, 
after contending with Athena, the two dispu- 
tants were reconciled, though obviously Athena 
remained the real mistress. Poseidon was 
worshipped by the old aristocracy but his salt 
sea well could not rival her olive tree. All 
these legends show clearly, what we know from 
archeological and other sources, that the 
Minoan civilization came to the mainland and 
prevailed for a time, but was ultimately over- 
laid and in part ousted by a purely Hellenic 
culture of Zeus-worshippers. 


With the Minotaur, the Bull-God, we are on 
firm Cretan ground. But what about the 
horse-god? Were the thalassocrats and bull 
breeders of Crete also horse rearers? The 
Cretans had horses and chariots, that is cer- 


[37] 


MYTHOLOGY 


tain. In the early part of the late Minoan 
period which synchronizes with the early part 
of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt, the horse 
makes its appearance on Minoan monuments. 
It is represented together with the royal char- 
iot on the clay tablets which form the Palace 
accounts, just as during the same period (circ. 
1500 B.c.) it appears on the tombstones and 
late frescoes of Mycene. But, and this is a 
most important point, by a happy chance we 
know that the horse was imported into Crete. 
A curious seal-impression found at Cnossus 
shows us a one-masted vessel with rowers be- 
neath a sort of awning. On the vessel, not 
as we now expect in the hold, but superim- 
posed over the whole design stands a mag- 
nificent horse. The superposition must, Sir 
Arthur Evans observes, be taken as a graphic 
mode and we have here a contemporary record 
of the first importation of horses to Crete. 
The date of the sealing is roughly 1500 B.c. 

Further, most happily, the sealing informs 
us whence the horse came. ‘This is of cardinal 
importance for the history of the development 
of the cult of the horse-Poseidon. The dress- 
ing of the horse’s mane in a series of tufts 
corresponds with that of the horses found on 


[38] 





POSEIDON 


the fresco of the megaron at Mycene and 
there the horses are coloured a deep bay and 
they have nose-bands. This is contrary to 
the normal European and Asiatic custom but 
is in accordance with Libyan practice. The 
horse on the Cretan sealing is a Libyan thor- 
oughbred. His fountain springing tail con- 
firms his origin. An imported horse is not an 
indigenous horse. We never hear of Crete as 
“horse-rearing,” like Argos or Thessaly. We 
have no evidence in Crete of a primitive horse- 
cult. King Minos does not wear a horse’s 
head. Talos the Sun-god, when he races 
round the island, has no chariot and horses; he 
goes day by day on foot. “Look at the char- 
acter of our country,” says Cleinias, the Cnos- 
sian, to the Athenian in the Laws (625 D): 
“Crete is not like Thessaly, a large plain; and 
for this reason they have horses there, and 
we have runners on foot here; the inequality 
of the ground in our country is more adapted 
to going about on foot.” 

In the light of the Libyan horse we begin 
to understand the explicit statement of Hero- 
dotus (II. 50) that Poseidon came to the 
Greeks from the Libyans. “This god,” he 
says, “they learned from the Libyans, for no 


[39] 


MYTHOLOGY 


people except the Libyans originally had the 
name of Poseidon and they have always wor- 
shipped him.” Further Herodotus tells us 
that it was from the Libyans that the Greeks 
first learned to yoke four horses to their char- 
iots. Poets projected these Libyan borrow- 
ings back into mythical days. In the fourth 
Pythian Ode of Pindar, Medea prophesies to 
the Minyan Jason of the colonization of Cy- 
rene and she foretells the strange change that 
will come over the sea-faring colonists. They 
will plant cities where Zeus Ammon’s shrine 
is builded and “wmstead of short-finned dol- 
phins they shall take to themselves fleet mares 
and reins, instead of oars shall they ply and 
speed the whirlwind-footed car.” 

Apollonius Rhodius, in his Argonautica (IV. 
1341 ff.), tells of an earlier meeting of the 
Minyans (2.e., the men of Minyas) with the 
horse-Poseidon in Libya. He brings his Ar- 
gonauts, it will be remembered, from Crete 
to Libya, which is indeed the nearest point 
of the African continent. The Argonauts are 
caught and miserably stranded in the shifting 
shallows of the Syrtes, and Peleus, one of their 
leaders, was well nigh desperate but “there 
came to the Minyans a wonder, passing 


[40] 


POSEIDON 


strange. From out the sea there leapt land- 
wards a monster Horse. Huge was he with 
mane flowing in the wind. Lightly with his 
hooves did he spurn the salt sea foam, match- 
ing the wind.” Like the Bull of Hippolytus, 
the monster Horse was a portent, was in fact 
the Epiphany of the god himself. Peleus, we 
are told, was glad in his heart for he knew that 
Poseidon himself wouid lift the ship and let 
her go. 

In Libya and in Libya only does there seem 
a simple and natural reason why a sea-faring 
god should become a horse-god, because in 
Libya we have the steady tradition of a race 
of horses which were the wonder of the ancient 
world. The story of Pegasus, the winged 
horse, took its rise in Libya and hence must 
have been transplanted by Poseidon wor- 
shippers to Greece. The Menads in the 
Bacche (990) sing that Pentheus is born of 
a lioness-mother of the race of the Libyan Gor- 
gons. The Kzibisis or leather wallet in which 
Perseus carries the severed head of Medusa 
is just the primitive bag in which the Libyan 
carried the stones which were his princi- 
pal weapons. ‘‘The Libyans,” says Diodorus 
(III. 49. 4), “go out to face the foe, armed with 


[41] 


MYTHOLOGY 


three lances and with stones in leather bags. 
They wear neither sword nor helmet nor any 
other weapon but look to get the better of their 
foe by swift movement. Hence they are very 
skilled in running and stone slaying.” On a 
Corinthian vase Perseus is figured attacking 
the monster with stones. Andromeda by his 
side keeps him supplied from a goodly pile. 
Always in representations of the slaying of 
Medusa Perseus is hurrying along at a pace 
truly Libyan. On the shield of Achilles, 


“All round the level rim thereof. 
Perseus on winged feet above 
The long seas hied him. 
The Gorgon’s wild and bleeding hair 
He lifted: and a herald fair 
He of the wilds whom Maia bare 
God’s Hermes flew beside him.” ™ 


Horse and man alike were swift in Libya; the 
winged Pegasus is the counterpart of the 
winged Perseus. 

Medusa, the mother of Pegasus by Poseidon, 
is generally credited with human shape. From 
her severed neck springs up the winged Peg- 
asus, aS on a white lecythus in New York City. 
But on one monument, a Bceotian stamped 


[42] 


POSEIDON 


amphora in the Louvre, Medusa herself has the 
body of a horse, though the face of a woman. 
She is a horse goddess and as such the fitting 
bride of the horse-Poseidon. The Beotian 
horse-Medusa recalls the horse-headed Deme- 
ter worshipped at Phigaleia in Arcadia. 
Before leaving the horse, one curious and 
interesting point must be noted. It has been 
already observed that, as contrasted with the 
bull, the horse had but small place in-the ritual 
of Poseidon. But sometimes a ritual motive 
lurks concealed where least suspected. Such 
is, I think, the case with the famous Trojan 
Horse. The story of the horse, it has been 
thought, arose from a real historical incident 
misunderstood. The device of Epeius, the 
horsemaker, was really, it is said, the building 
of a wooden siege tower as high as the walls, 
with a projecting and revolving neck. Such 
an engine is figured on Assyrian monuments. 
But when we read the chorus of the Trojan 
Women, in which Euripides describes the 
Horse, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion 
or at least the suggestion that ritual rather 
than historic incident lies behind. The Horse 
is a “hobby-horse,” a fertility horse, a thing 
that survives in village tradition and custom 


[43] 


MYTHOLOGY 


to-day. It was a demonic, even a divine 
thing. It was explained as a votive offering, 
when its real magical meaning was misunder- 
stood. It was connected with a definite date in 
the calendar, with the setting of the Pleiades, 
always to the Greeks a season of agricultural 
importance; and above all it was brought up 
to the city in a great festal procession of young 
and old flute players and dancers, a regular 
Comus. 

In the chorus of Euripides, the Trojan 
Women sing of it: 


“A towering Steed of golden rein— 
O gold without, dark steel within 
Ramped in our gates: and all the plain 
Lay silent where the Greeks had been,” 


and again, 


“O, swift were all in Troy that day, 
And girt them to the portal-way, 
Marvelling at that mountain Thing 
Smooth-carven where the Argives lay, 
And wrath, and Ilion’s vanquishing: 
Meet gift for her that spareth not, 
Heaven's yokeless Rider,’ 


and a maiden sings: 
[44] 


ee a 


POSEIDON 


“TY was among the dancers there 
To Artemis, and glorying sang 
Her of the Hills, the Maid most fair, 
Daughter of Zeus: and, lo, there rang 
A shout out of the dark, and fell 
Deathlike from street to street and made 
A silence in the citadel.” 


In the Prologue to the same play Poseidon 
himself tells how 


“The Greek Epeios came, of Phocian seed, 

And wrought by Pallas’ mysteries a Steed 
Marvellous, big with arms: and through my wall 
It passed, a death-fraught image magical.” 


In “horse-rearing Argos’ some hobby horse 
must have formed part of a fertility ritual. 
The essence of the modern and apparently of 
the ancient hobby horse was that it concealed 
actual live men. This ritual contrivance may 
actually have been used for some military am- 
bush—but it is more likely that when its real 
ritual meaning was obscured it was misinter- 
preted. It is worth noting that the Trojan 
horse has an odd Cretan counterpart which 
seems to have passed unobserved. Apollodo- 
rus( III. 1. 4) tells us that Dedalus to please 
Ariadne made a wooden cow on wheels, hol- 


[45] 


MYTHOLOGY 


lowed it out inside, flayed a cow, sewed the 
hide about his handiwork and put Pasiphaé 
inside. A wooden cow, a wooden horse, both 
hollowed to hold human beings. Both were 
part of some ritual gear of a magical ‘‘sacred 
marriage” or a ritual of resurrection. ‘The 
tale of the Trojan Horse has all the air of a 
ritual fossil embedded. There could be no 
finer instance of the magic of Greek inaugura- 
tion than the use Euripides has made of it in 
the Chorus of the Trojan Women. The un- 
couth even ugly contrivance is transmuted to 
a thing of wonder and beauty. ) 


We have seen the Bull-god in Crete as tha- 
lassocratic, we have seen him become in Libya 
a Horse-god. We have now to watch him pass 
to the mainland to Greece proper. The cult 
of Poseidon occurs naturally in the bays and on 
the promontories of the coast line of Greece. 
We say “naturally,” but if I am right the nat- 
uralness is not at all what it would seem at 
first sight. The cult of Poseidon occurs in 
bays and on promontories not because it is 
a sea-cult but because those bays and those 
promontories were the first landing places of 
the Minos bull from Crete. 


[46] 


POSEIDON 


The bull of Minos waxed fat and kicked. 
King Minos desired not only what was his nat- 
ural right, the hegemony of the A‘gean islands. 
His lust for empire was his undoing. But at 
first all went well. During the third and sec- 
ond millenniums sB.c., the Cretans colonized 
Greece. The sites of Poseidon-worship are 
the landing places of immigrant Muinoans. 
Into the archzological evidence of this we can- 
not here enter. It is enough to state the sim- 
ple fact that at each and every site of Poseidon 
worship on the mainland, Mycenean (1. €é., 
late-Minoan) antiquities have come to light. 

Let us take an instance. 

In the Odyssey, Telemachus reaches Pylus 
on the coast of the western Peloponnese. 
What does he find at the “’stablished castle 
of Neleus’” where dwells old Nestor “tamer 
of horses”? Down on the sea shore the 
people 


“Made to the blue-haired Shaker of the Earth 
Oblation, slaying coal-black bulls to him. 


Nine messes were there, and in each of these 
Five-hundred men set after their degrees 
Offered nine bulls: and then on the inward meat 
They fed and burned to God the thigh-pieces. 


[47] 


MYTHOLOGY 


And to Poseidon the Protector now 

Made supplication, saying, ‘Hearken thou, 
Poseidon, Girdler of the Earth, nor grudge 
Our work to end according to our vow.” 8 


The site of the modern Kakovatos, shown by 
Professor Dorpfeld to be the Homeric Pylus, 
has yielded the beehive tombs which their 
contents show to be as early as late Minoan 
he 

Going Eastward from Pylus we come to 
Tenarum. ‘This great promontory was prob- 
ably one of the first points at which the immi- 
grant Minoans would touch. Nor is this con- 
tact mere conjecture. Plutarch (De_ sera 
numinis vindicta, 17) tells us of a certain man 
who had slain Archilochus and was bidden by 
the Pythian priestess to go to appease the ghost 
—to the “habitation of Tettix.”” The “habita- 
tion of Tettix” Plutarch explains was Tzna- 
rum, for there, they said, Tettix the Cretan 
came with a fleet. The name Tettix “cicada” 
smacks of things ancient. Pindar too remem- 
bers Tenarum (Pytk., IV. 75) and connects 
it with Euphemus son of Poseidon. The Po- 
seidon cult at Tenarum, it is important to note, 


[48] 


POSEIDON 


was mainly in the hands of a subject race, the 
Helots. Poseidon was worshipped there as 
Asphaleius, which means not the steadfast 
earth but the safe asylum. Poseidon to the 
oppressed Helots was a veritable Rock of Ages. 
In the rocks of Tenarum were found seventy 
bronze statuettes representing bulls and horses. 
Here too were found inscriptions dedicating 
slaves to the service of Poseidon. 

By each one of the great sea gates, the gulfs 
of Messene, of Laconia, of Argolis, and by the 
Saronic gulf and the channel of the Euripus 
Minoan settlers entered Greece, but nowhere 
did they leave more manifest mark than in 
Argolis. The plain of Argos was and is still 
rich and “horse-breeding” though the harbour- 
age is bad. It may be for that reason that 
the Minoan fortresses are all planted inland. 
Palamedes brought the Cretan script to the 
sea-town of Nauplia but Tiryns with its cita- 
del is two miles inland. We have seen that at 
Dione horses were offered to Poseidon. It is 
natural to ask have we also traces of the bull- 
god? Fortunately yes. The frescoes of 
Tiryns with their bull-fights take us straight 
back to Crete; they might have adorned the 
palace of King Minos. Moreover an odd 


[49] 


MYTHOLOGY 


story in Athenzus (VI. 79) lets out that the 
regular offering to Poseidon at Tiryns was a 
bull. We do not think of the Tirynthians as a 
specially humorous folk but Theophrastus in 
his treatise on Comedy said they loved laugh- 
ter and were quite unfit for serious business. 
They wished to cure themselves of this defect 
and consulted the oracle at Delphi. The god 
made answer that when they were sacrificing 
a bull to Poseidon, if they would throw it into 
the sea without laughing they would be cured. 
Very prudently they forbade the boys of 
Tiryns to come to the sacrifice but a boy got 
in among the crowd and when they tried to 
hoot him out he said “Yr’r frightened lest I 
should upset yr bull,” and they laughed, and 
realized that the god had meant to show them 
it was impossible to uproot an old habit. The 
bull-sacrifices of Poseidon in Homer are things 
of tremendous solemnity, but here we get a 
glimpse of the lighter side of the matter. 
Oddly enough Atheneus follows the story 
up by telling us, on the authority of So- 
sicrates in the first book of his History of 
Crete, that the people of Phestus in Crete had 
the like reputation for lightheartedness. “The 
Phestians,” he says, “from earliest childhood 


[50] 


POSEIDON 


practised the art of saying ridiculous things 
and the Cretans unanimously attributed to 
them pre-eminence in the art of raising a 
laugh.” It is possible, nay probable, that 
these laughter-loving Phestians crossed over 
from Crete to Tiryns. At Mycenz we have 
no record of Poseidon cult, it was perhaps the 
most completely Achzanized of all the Minoan 
settlements, but the walls of Mycenez, it was 
fabled, were built by the Cyclopes, children of 
Poseidon. Poseidon we know had once ruled 
over the whole land; he had shown the water- 
springs of Lerna to his bride Amymone and 
when the sovereignty of the land was ad- 
judged to Hera, Poseidon in wrath dried up 
the springs and made Argos “very thirsty.” 
The rival cult of Hera Bodpis (the Oxfaced) 
was rich in bulls, Argos himself Apollodorus 
(II. 1. 2) tells us wore a bull’s hide and has 
strange analogies with the Minotaur. When 
the two bulls met it may well be that the bull 
aspect of Poseidon was obscured and that he 
wisely, in “‘horse-rearing Argos,” specialized in 
horses. 

Passing the great sanctuary of Poseidon on 
the island of Calaureia we come on the op- 
posite mainland to Troezen, associated always 


[51] 


MYTHOLOGY 


with the legend of Theseus. Troezen, Strabo 
(VIII. 14. 373) says, was sacred to Poseidon 
and was once called Poseidonia. Plutarch 
(Vita Theset, 6) tells us that the Troezenians 
honoured Poseidon conspicuously, gave him 
the title of Poliouchus (Holder of the City), 
offered to him their first fruits and had his 
trident impressed on their coins. At Trcezen 
clearly Poseidon is much more than sea-god. 
Excavations on the site yielded a pre-historic 
pit-grave containing four large vases of “My- 
cenzean” 7. e., late Minoan style. Troezen had, 
like Athens, its legend of a contest between 
Poseidon and Athena for the land. Which 
legend is the prototype of the other is hard to 
say. In any case the moral is the same as in 
the case of Hera at Argos. We have an in- 
digenous goddess of the land, a local Koré or 
Maiden and an immigrant god who strives 
with but partial success for the upper hand. 
Troezen is not without its legend of Cretan im- 
migration. The Troezenians, Pausanias (II. 
32. 2) says, honoured Damia and Auxesia and 
they said that these goddesses were maidens 
who came from Crete. 

But the legend most important for our argu- 
ment looks the reverse way and tells of the 


[52] 


POSEIDON 


conquering expedition of a Trcezenian hero 
against Crete. And that hero is none other 
than Theseus. 

Theseus, hero of Treezen, is for our purpose 
a figure of the first importance. He is son of 
the local princess Aithra but his father is none 
other than Poseidon himself. Poseidon the 
story said met and loved the princess in the 
little island of Sphaira, close to Calaureia. 
Theseus stands for the blend of indigenous 
Hellene and immigrant Minoan. He also 
stands for the Amphictyony of Calaureia, po- 
tent in those early days and which linked up 
the coast cities from the promontory of Troezen 
to Athens. He goes to Athens and stands also 
for the time when Athens held the hegemony 
of the coast confederation. His first work on 
coming to manhood is to cleanse the coast road 
of robbers, many of them sons of Poseidon like 
himself. By cleansing the road he makes the 
league of coast towns a possibility. All the 
mythology of Procrustes, Sciron, Sinis and the 
like, translated into pre-history, figure forth 
the league’s great civilizing work. Calaureia 
stands for the dawning thalassocracy of the 
mainland, soon to meet Crete in mortal con- 
flict. 


[53] 


MYTHOLOGY 


The crisis is at hand. No sooner has 
Theseus reached Athens and been acknowl- 
edged heir of A®geus than he is straightway 
sent off to Crete with the fatal tribute to the 
Minotaur. The Bull of Crete, that is Minos 
himself, has wasted Attica and subdued Me- 
gara and has been hardly bought off. The 
tribute-ship is matter of history. It was pre- 
served by the Athenians down to the time of 
Demetrius Phalerius and was then so pieced 
and mended Plutarch tells us in his Life of 
Theseus that it afforded the philosophers an 
illustration in their disputations as to the iden- 
tity of things changed by growth. In the days 
of Socrates the ship sailed for Delos but all 
men knew that in olden times the same ship 
had sailed to Crete with the tribute for the 
Minotaur. Owing to the Dorian conquest the 
religious centre had shifted from Crete to 
Delos. Poseidon had emigrated. In the cur- 
rent legend the two centres are awkwardly 
linked together. Theseus is made to call at 
Delos on his way home in order to dance the 
crane dance. It is rarely that we see pre-his- 
tory so clearly reflected in mythology. 

And finally, in the Labyrinth, Theseus slays 
the Minotaur. He, the son of Poseidon, he, 


[54] 


POSEIDON 


who, according to another legend, married the 
Cretan Phedra and sent the bull of his father 
Poseidon to slay his son Hippolytus, he, 
Theseus, sails to Crete and slays the royal 
bull and drags him from his great palace. It 
all sounds at first paradoxical but viewing the 
god and the hero in terms of the worshipper 
the riddle is not hard to read. Theseus we 
must always remember is not Poseidon himself, 
only the son of, that is the descendant of Posei- 
don. He stands, I think, for the worshippers 
of Poseidon partially Hellenized, Achzanized 
on the mainland. The bull of Cnossus had in- 
deed waxed fat and kicked, imposing intol- 
erable tribute on Athens, on Megara and prob- 
ably on all the coast towns of the Amphic- 
tyony. The tributaries turned at last and 
somewhere about 1400 s.c., Cnossus fell by 
the hands of her own children, the colonists 
of the mainland. The fall of Cnossus caused 
no breach in Minoan civilization: there was 
no intrusion of an alien race. 

Cnossus falls, the Minotaur is slain by the 
young Athenian hero Theseus, and henceforth 
for Athens and for all the civilized world that 
lay under the ban of Athens, the royal bull 
is a savage monster. Ve Victis! But Plato 


[55] 


MYTHOLOGY 


or whoever is the writer of the Minos (318 E) 
knew quite well that this was only because 
events were seen through hostile Athenian 
eyes. Crete was the mother and source not 
of barbarism, though her wealth is not wholly 
free from some tinge of barbaric excess, but of 
civilization. Minos to his enemies might be 
the ‘“‘baleful one” but he was a mighty law- 
giver and made piracy to cease. When in the 
dialogue the companion of Socrates admits 
that Rhadamanthus was reputed a just judge, 
but would maintain that Minos was fierce and 
hard, Socrates turns on him and says, “but 
my good man you know that is but an Attic 
fable that you are telling, a stage-plot,” and he 
himself tells a different tale. Even on Attic 
vase-paintings there are traces of the sanctity 
of the Cretan Bull. He wears fillets like the 
Minotaur. Commentators explain that he 
wears them “‘proleptically” by anticipation, be- 
cause he is about to be sacrificed by Heracles 
or Theseus. He wears them, because he al- 
ways wore them, because he is the holy and 
royal Bull of Crete. 


We have traced Poseidon from Pylus to 
Athens. It would be easy and pleasant to 


[56] 


POSEIDON 


follow his track further along the coast round 
Attica by Beotia through the Euripus by 
Eubcea on to Iolcus and finally to Tempe. 
But space does not allow nor is it needful for 
our argument. Everywhere we should only 
find the same tale repeated, the worship of the 
bull-god and the horse-god, the presence of the 
Minyans, the people of Minos, and everywhere, 
when excavation has been made, Minoan re- 
mains. Once Tempe reached, the Minoan col- 
onists seem to have paused; we find no more 
Minoan remains; the horse-god and the bull- 
god disappear. 


Poseidon has been dealt with at some length 
and at the outset not because he is the most in- 
teresting of the Olympians nor yet because he 
is the most characteristically Greek. Far 
from it. He has been the subject of no great 
masterpiece of art whether in poetry or sculp- 
ture. He has been chosen for two reasons. 
First because he stands for that great pre- 
Hellenic Minoan civilization without a knowl- 
edge of which it is impossible nowadays to at- 
tempt any study of Greek art. The Minoans 
were great civilizers, great artificers, great 
craftsmen, and a people profoundly religious; 


[57] 


MYTHOLOGY 


they were not a people of artists; with all their 
skill and all their splendid material and costly 
apparatus they lack that instinct for beauty, 
that austere reserve, that divine spark which 
was all Hellenic. We must not ask of Posei- 
don what is not his to give. Secondly, Posei- 
don has been chosen because perhaps better 
than any other god he illustrates the principle 
by which the new psychology works, the prin- 
ciple namely that regards mythology and the- 
ology as springing, not clean and clear from 
man’s imagination, but rather from man’s, 
from the worshipper’s reactions to his environ- 
ment. There ave, we repeat, no ancient gods; 
there are ancient reactions, emotions, activ- 
ities, embodied in reptesentations. It is for 
us to discover those reactions. In a word, 
mythology is pre-history and when it is con- 
firmed by archeology, as in the case of Posei- 
don, we may venture to trust it. 


[58] 


III. THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


E have left behind us the figure of 

Poseidon but we have not yet 

done with Crete. Crete has given 
us a mythological figure of the first impor- 
tance, the Mountain-Mother. On the clay 
impression of a signet ring (Fig. 4), found in 
the palace of Cnossus, she stands before us 
and this sealing is a veritable little manual of 
early Cretan ritual and mythology. When by 
the kindness of the discoverer Sir Arthur 
Evans I first saw its fragments in the Museum 
at Candia it seemed to me almost “‘too good 
to be true.” On the summit of her own great 
mountains stands the Mother with sceptre out- 
stretched. The Minoan women have indeed 
made their goddess in their own image. ‘They 
have dressed her, wild creature though she 
was, as they dressed themselves in grotesque 
fashion in a flounced skirt, she has their nar- 
row pinched waist and for solemn guardians 
they have given the fierce, mountain ranging 
lions, placed heraldically to either side. These 
lions are thrice familiar. They guard the 


[59] 


MYTHOLOGY 


gate at Mycene, only there the goddess is fig- 
ured by the pillar between them, here she has 
come to life, imperious, dominant. To the left 





Faete 4 
The Mountain-Mother 


of the goddess is a Minoan shrine with “horns 
of consecration” and pillars, the symbols that 
connect her with plant and animal life, for the 
pillar is but tree shaped and stylized. Before 
the goddess stands a worshipper in ecstasy. 

On this sealing the Mother, the Woman- 
goddess, stands and rules alone. On other 
gems a male divinity descending from the sky 
sometimes appears. But always noticeably he 


[60] 


THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


is young and subordinate. In Minoan religion 
the male divinity is sometimes merely the at- 
tribute of motherhood, a child, sometimes a 
young man and sometimes a sky-power that 
fertilizes the Earth. Now this supremacy of 
the Mother marks a contrast with the Olym- 
pian system, where Zeus the Father reigns su- 
preme. It stands for the Earth Worship as 
contrasted with the Sky. At Dodona the lit- 
any chanted by the priestesses has been pre- 
served for us by Pausanias (X. 12. 10). It 
was as follows: 


“Earth sends up fruits, so praise we Earth, the 
Mother.” 


The mountain naturally enough in Crete stood 
for Earth, and the Earth is Mother because 
she gives life to plants, to animals, to man. 
When in the Eumenides of Atschylus the 
priestess of Delphi begins her address to the 
successive divinities of the place her opening 
words are: 


“First in my prayer before all other gods 
I call on Earth, primeval prophetess.” 


Our modern patriarchal society focuses its 
religious anthropomorphism on the Father and 


[61] 


MYTHOLOGY 


the Son: the Roman Church with her wider 
humanity includes the figure of the Mother, 
who is both Mother and Maid. In this she 
follows the teaching of the Minoans. The 
mother and the father cults are in fact of su- 
preme importance for our understanding of that 
complex structure Greek theology, they are 
characteristic of the two main strata that un- 
derlie Greek religion, the southern and earlier 
stratum, which is Anatolian as well as Cretan 
and has the dominant Mother-God, while the 
northern stratum which is Indo-European has 
the Father-God, head of a patriarchal family 
and, ostensibly at least, in spite of countless 
amours the husband of one wife. The north- 
ern religion of course reflects a patrilinear, 
the southern a matrilinear social structure. 
It is not a little remarkable and shows how 
deep seated was the sense of difference that 
the Mother was never admitted to the Olympus 
of Homer. Even Demeter, honoured though 
she was through the length and breadth of 
Greece, had never in Olympus any but the 
most precarious footing. In later, post-Ho- 
meric days, when North and South were fused, 
a place was found for the Mother in a more 
elastic Pantheon, as Mother of the Gods. 


[62] 


THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


The Homeric patriarchal Olympus reflected 
and was the outcome of a “heroic” state of 
society, that is it emphasized rather the in- 
dividual than the group, it resulted from war- 
like and migratory conditions. On the other 
hand the worship of the Mother emphasizes 
the group, the race and its continuance rather 
than the prowess of the individual, it focuses 
on the facts of fertility and the fostering of 
life. Accordingly, she being concerned with 
the group rather than the individual is at- 
tended not only by her subordinate son and 
lover but by groups of dzmonic persons, 
Curetes, Telchines, Corybantes, Satyrs and the 
like. Of these we shall hear more when we 
come to the figure of Dionysus the Son-God, 
but it must be noted that these bands of wor- 
shippers also attend the Mother. The chorus 
of Menads in the Bacche of Euripides know 
that their worship was one with the worship 
of the Mother—they sing: 


“But the Timbrel, the Timbrel. was another's, 
And away to Mother Rhea tt must wend ; 
And to our holy singing from the Mother's 
The mad Satyrs carried it, to blend 
In the dancing and the cheer 


[63] 


MYTHOLOGY 


Of our third, and perfect Year; 
And it serves Dionysus in the end!” 4 


Another all important point. The worship 
of the Mother is always mystical and orgiastic. 
The mysteries of Greece never centre round 
Zeus the Father, but rather round the Mother 
and the subordinate son. The Olympian 
father and indeed all Olympian gods are ap- 
proached in rational, anthropomorphic fash- 
ion, they are treated as magnified men ad- 
dressed by prayer, praise, presents—but the 
Mother is approached by means that are mag- 
ical and mysterious, she has mysteries. Mys- 
teries we no longer regard as mysterious in 
the sense of unintelligible. They are simply 
magical rites, dramatic representations of 
birth, marriage and death, and they are per- 
formed with the magical intent of promoting 
fertility. The divinities who preside over 
these magical rites are always vaguer in out- 
line than those who are approached by prayer 
and praise. ‘The Mother was never so clearly 
and fully projected into human form as the 
Father. The mystery par excellence of the 
Mother was her “sacred marriage,” a magical 
ceremony for the induction of fertility. 

The great Mother of Crete though she was 


[64 ] 


THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


never admitted to Olympus had great influence 
on Greek thought and religion. Many of her 
sacred animals and attributes, much of her 
nature in general she lent to the women divin- 
ities of the mainland. To Hera she lent her 
“sacred marriage,” to Demeter her mysteries, 
to Athena her snakes, to Aphrodite her doves, 
to Artemis all her functions as ‘‘Lady of the 
Wild Things.” And most of all the functions 
of the dominant goddess with the subordinate 
figure of the male attendant, half-son, half- 
lover. Attis and Adonis are echoed again and 
again in Greek mythoiogy in those figures of 
Hera and Jason, Athena and Theseus. ‘Their 
high companionship does not reflect the purely 
Greek relations of man to woman. 

One lovely figure in Greek mythology un- 
doubtedly comes straight to us from the Cretan 
Mother, that is the figure of Pandora, the All- 
giver. On vase-paintings the Earth-Mother is 
often figured rising balf out of the actual 
ground. On a red-figured amphora in the 
Ashmolean Museum at Oxford above the up- 
rising figure which we are accustomed to call 
Gaia, the Earth, is written the name Pandora. 
In origin there is no doubt that Pandora was 
simply the Earth-Mother, the All-giver, but an 


[65] 


MYTHOLOGY 


irresponsible patriarchal mythology changed 
her into a fair woman dowered with all manner 
of gifts, the gift of all the gods. Hesiod in 
the Works and Days thus tells the story: 


“He spake, and they did the will of Zeus, son of 
Kronos, the Lord; 

For straightway the Halting One, the Famous, at 
his word 

Took clay and moulded an image, in form cf a 
maiden fair, 

And Athene, the gray-eyed goddess, girt her, and 
decked her hair. 

And about her the Graces divine and our Lady 
Persuasion set 

Bracelets of gold on her flesh; and about her 
others yet, 

The Hours, with their beautiful hair, twined 
wreaths of blossoms of spring, 

While Pallas Athene still ordered her decking in 
everything. 

Then put the Argus-slayer, the marshal of sails, 
to their place 

Tricks and flattering words in her bosom, and 
thievish ways. 

He wrought by the will of Zeus, the Loud-thun- 
dering, giving her voice, 

Spokesman of gods that he is, and for name of 
her this was his choice, 


[66] 


THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


PANDORA, because in Olympus the gods joined 
together then 

And all of them gave her, a gift, a sorrow to 
covetous men.” 18 


Truly the ways of mythology are not always 
upwards, the Great Mother has become the 
Temptress maid. 

But the Great Mother was never wholly for- 
gotten. On the Bale Cylix in the British Mu- 
seum the birth of Pandora or rather her fash- 
ioning is depicted. Athena and Hephestus to 
either side are busy with her bedecking. But 
the inscription above her is not Pandora but 
Anesidora the “sender up of gifts,” true epi- 
thet of the Earth-Mother. Moreover Pan- 
dora’s box has become proverbial, but on en- 
quiry it turns out not to be a box at all. The 
word used by Hesiod is pithos and pithos 
means not a box but a large earthenware jar. 
These pithoi were used by the Greeks as store- 
houses for grain, wine and oil. Rows of them 
have come to light at Cnossus, some with re- 
mains of grain stored in them. When Pan- 
dora opens her box it is not the woman temp- 
tress letting out the woes of mortal man, it is 
the great Earth-Mother who opens her pithos, 


[67 ] 


MYTHOLOGY 


her store-house of grain and fruits for her 
children. Through all the glamour of Hesiod’s 
verse, enchanted as he is himself by the vision 
of the lovely temptress, there gleams also an 
ugly and malicious theological animus; he is 
all for the Father and the Father will have no 
great Earth-Goddess in his man-made Olym- 
pus. So she who made all things, gods and 
mortals, is unmade and remade and becomes 
the plaything of man, his slave, his lure, dow- 
ered only with bodily beauty and with a slave’s 
tricks and blandishments. To Zeus the arch- 
patriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first 
woman is a hugh Olympian joke: 


“He spake and the Sire of men and of gods wm- 
mortal laughed.” 


Such a myth rose necessarily and naturally in 
the social shift from matrilinear to patrilinear 
conditions. 


1. THE GORGON 


So far we have seen in the Earth-Mother 
a figure mild and beneficent, the giver of gifts 
and the Lady, the Protector of all wild things, 


[68 ] 


THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


but the Earth-Mother had another and a very 
different aspect. Not only did she bring all 
things to birth but when live things died she 
received them back into her bosom. Cicero 
(de Natura Deorum, Il. 26. 66) says “all 
things go back to earth and rise out of the 
earth’—“dust we are and unto dust do we 
return.” Aischylus (Choephori, 127) says: 


“Vea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life 
And rears and takes again into her womb.” 


The Athenians called the dead, “‘Demeter’s 
people,” using the name of their own local 
Earth goddess and at the Nekusia, the festival 
of the dead, they sacrificed to Earth. A ghost 
is to primitive man a thing of dread, and so 
the Earth-Mother as Guardian of the dead 
took on a dread shape, she became a Gorgon. 
In the British Museum there is a Rhodian 
plate on which the Mother is figured with a 
human body and feet and hands in which she 
grasps two birds, but she is winged and in 
place of a human head she has a Gorgoneion, 
a Gorgon-mask. 

Such a thing as a Gorgon never of course ex- 
isted. What then is the Gorgoneion? It is 


[69] 


MYTHOLOGY 


simply a ritual mask, an ugly face made as 
hideous as possible so as to scare both men 
and demons. Ordinarily the Gorgoneion had 
pendent tongue, glaring eyes, protruding tusks. 
It was an image of fear incarnate. Such rit- 
ual masks are still in use among savages to 
scare all evil things, enemies in the flesh and 
ghostly foes. The Gorgon’s Head first ap- 
pears in Greek literature in Homer. Odys- 
seus wishes to hold converse with dead heroes 
but 


“Ere that might be, the ghosts thronged round, in 
myriads manifold, | 
Weird was the magic din they made, a pale green 

fear gat hold 
Of me, lest for my daring Persephone the dread 
From Hades should send up an awful monster's 
grizzly head.’ *® 


Here clearly the Gorgon’s head is guardian to 
the ghosts. We might have thought it would 
have been more efficacious to send up the Gor- 
gon, the “grizzly monster” itself, but there was 
no monster to send, only a grizzly head. The 
dreadful head in all early art representations 
is prominent, the body is a mere appendage 
awkwardly tacked on. The Gorgon as mon- 


[70] 


THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


ster sprang straight from the Gorgoneion, not 
the Gorgoneion from the Gorgon. The origi- 
nal ritual mask survives on the egis of 
Athena. 

But the fertile fancy of the Greeks could 
not let well or ill alone. New ritual gave them 
a mask or Gorgon’s head; if there was a Gor- 
gon’s head there must have been a Gorgon or 
better still, as things sacred tend to run in 
Trinities, three Gorgons and so we get 
(Aéschylus, Prometheus Vinctus, 798 ff.) 


“those sisters three, the Gorgons winged 
With snakes for hair, hated of mortal man, 
None may behold and bear their breathing blight.” 


The Gorgon slew by the eye, it fascinated, it 
was in fact a sort of incarnate Evil-Eye. The 
severed head of course helped out the myth 
maker. The severed head, the ritual mask 
was a fact. Whence came this _bodiless, 
dreadful head? It must needs have been 
severed from the body of some monster—so a 
slayer must be provided and Perseus is ready 
for the part. The remarkable thing is that 
the Greeks could not in their mythology toler- 
ate the ugliness of the Gorgon. They turned 
the head of Medusa into the head of a lovely 


[71] 


MYTHOLOGY 


sorrow-stricken woman. In like fashion they 
could not tolerate the Gorgon form of the 
Earth-Mother. It was the mission of the 
Greek artist and the Greek poet to cleanse 
religion from’ fear. This is the greatest of 
debts that we owe to the Greek myth-maker. 


u. THe ERINvEsS-EUMENIDES 


This purgation of religion, this casting out 
or rather transmutation of the spirit of fear 
is very clearly and beautifully seen in those 
other Earth-Spirits, the Erinyes. The Erinys 
is primarily, as the name signifies, the ‘“an- 
gry one,” the angry ghost—the ghost of the 
murdered man who calls for vengeance. 
fEschylus (Septem, 988) makes his chorus 
chant: 


“Alas, thou Fate, grievous, dire to be borne, 
And Cedipus! holy Shade, 
Black Erinys, verily, mighty art thou.” 


The blood of the slain man poisons the earth 
and the murderer, infecting him like a bacillus 
breeding disease. So the chorus in the Choe- 
phori (66) chants: 


[72] 


THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


“Earth that feeds him hath drunk of the gore, 

Blood calling for vengeance flows never more 

But stiffens, and pierces its way 

Through the murderer breeding disease that none 
may allay.” 


This is perhaps the most primitive notion of 
all, the blood itself poisoning the earth, but 
soon, very soon, the curse of the blood takes 
personal shape as an embodied curse, haunt- 
ing, pursuing the murderer. 

When Athena in the Eumenides (417) asks 
the Erinyes formally who and what they are, 
the answer is: 


“Curses our name, in haunts below the earth,’ 


and again she demands their rights and pre- 
rogatives: 


“Man slaying men we drive from out their 
homes.” 


Homer who gives to his Olympians such clear 
outline has no definite shape for these angry 
Curses of the Underworld, they are terrors 
unseen. But A®schylus has to give them 
definite forms because in his Eumenides he 
brings them actually on the stage. How does 


ey 


MYTHOLOGY 


he figure them? He knows they are Earth- 
spirits and he makes them half-Gorgons and 
half-Harpies, only more loathly than either. 

The priestess has beheld them in her temple 
at Delphi and horror-stricken she staggers back 
to tell what she has seen. They are crouch- 
ing around Orestes, murderer of his mother: 


“Fronting the man I saw a wondrous band 

Of women, sleeping on the seats. But no! 

No women these, but Gorgons—yet methinks 

I may not liken them to Gorgon-shapes. 

Once on a time I saw those pictured things 

That snatch at Phineus’ feast, but these, but these 

Are wingless—black, foul utterly. They snore, 

Breathing out noisome breath. From out their 
eves 

They ooze a loathly rheum.” ** 


Before the time of A‘schylus the Erinyes had 
no fixed form, there was no tradition of art 
for him to fall back on. 

When the mad Orestes sees them (Choe- 
phori, 1048), he sees only the shapes he 
knows: 


“These are the Gorgon shapes 
‘Black robed with tangled tentacles entwined 
Of frequent snakes.” 


[74] 


THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


These “frequent snakes” are indeed of the 
very essence of the Erinys; the snake symbol 
and incarnation of the dead man is her most 
primitive form. When Clytemnestra in the 
Eumenides (126) finds the Erinyes sleeping 
and would rouse them she cries: 

“Travail and Sleep, chartered conspirators 

Have spent the fell rage of the dragoness.” 


And in the [phigenia in Tauris (286), the mad 
Orestes catching sight of his mother’s ghost 
cries to Pylades: 


“Dost see her, her the Hades-snake who gapes 
To slay me, with dread vipers open-mouthed?”’ 


The snake is more than the symbol of the 
dead, it is the vehicle of vengeance, the Erinys 
herself. As such the snake-symbol proper to 
the ghost-Erinys is transferred to the liv- 
ing avenger. Orestes says in the Choephori 
(549): 


“Myself am serpent’s shape 
Will slay her.” 
And when Clytemnestra pleads for mercy he 
answers (927): 


“Nay, for my father’s fate hisses thy doom.” 


[75] 


MYTHOLOGY 


Into what are these terrible snake and Gor- 
gon figures, by the power of the poet’s imagi- 
nation, transformed? ‘They are transformed 
into Eumenides, Kindly Ones, and they dwell 
henceforth in the cave of the Semne, the 
Venerable Ones, on the Areopagos at Athens. 
On three votive reliefs found near Argos the 
Semne are figured, and about their forms 
there is assuredly nothing frightful, they are 


not Erinyes, not the loathly horrors of tragedy, — 


they are staid matronly figures who carry in 
their left hands fruit and flowers tokens of 
fertility, and in their right hands snakes, the 
symbols no longer of torture and vengeance, 
but merely symbols of the underworld as the 
source of food and wealth. The dedicator is 
in each case a woman and on each relief is 
figured a man and woman worshipper. The 
inscription says “‘a vow to the Eumenides.” It 
may be that husband and wife went to the 
shrine together and offered the regular sacrifice 
of honey and water and flowers and a ewe 
great with young (A¢sch., Eumenides, 834):. 


“The first-fruits offered for accomplishment 
Of marriage and for children.” 


[76] 


a 


THE MOUNTAIN-MOTHER 


Changed into Semne, the Erinyes cease 
from their hideous cries for vengeance and ask 
Athena what spells they shall henceforth chant 
over the land. She makes answer: 


“Whatever charms wait on fair Victory 

From earth, from dropping dew and from high 
heaven, 

The wealth of winds that blow to hail the land 

Sunlit, and fruits of earth and teeming flocks 

Untouched of time, safety for human seed,’ 


And the chorus transformed accept henceforth 
their functions of life and health and growth, 
and the promised guerdon is chanted in the 
immortal words: 


“No wind to wither trees shall blow 

By our grace tt shall be so! 

Nor that, nor shrivelling heat 

On budding plants shall beat 
With parching dearth 
To waste their growth, 

Nor any plague of dismal blight come creeping; 
But teeming, doubled flocks the earth 
In her season shall bring forth, 

And ever more a wealthy race 
Pay reverence for this our grace 


[77] 


MYTHOLOGY 


Of spirits that have the rich earth in thew keep- 
ing.” 38 


And as the great procession, purple-robed, 
torch-bearing, winds up the hill we know that 
there is “peace upon earth, goodwill to men.” 

In the case of the Gorgon and the Earth- 
Mother, and still more with the Erinyes- 
Eumenides we see the actual purgation in proc- 
ess, we watch the Greek spirit turn away from 
fear and anger to peace and love, and the 
Greek worshipper refuse the ritual of apo- 
tropé, of repulsion, and choose the free service 
of therapeia, tendance. But in many another 
mythological figure the process must have gone 
on unseen. The Olympian gods we have still 
to study come to us almost wholly purged of 
all harshness and elements of fear, but here 
and there, more in ritual than in theology, are 
indications that the spirit of savagery was close 
at hand; and always on the breast of Athena, 
herself incarnation of the Greek spirit though 
she is, there is the image of the Gorgon, of 
Fear incarnate. 


[78] 


IV. DEMETER AND KORE: THE 
EARTH-MOTHER AND THE 
EARTH-MAIDEN 


O long as man lived by hunting he was 
content to project the image of the 


Lady-of-the-Wild-Things. But a time 
came when he settled down and began to sow 
seeds and reap grain and then he must needs 
image his divinity, express his desire in a new 
form that of the Corn-Mother and the Corn- 
Maiden. ‘They are but the younger and the 
older forms, each of the other. Demeter is not 
the Earth-Mother, she is goddess of the fruits 
of the civilized cultured field of the tilth—her 
name probably means spelt-mother or more 
generally Grain-Mother. We may feel sur- 
prised that an incarnation of grain-growing 
and agriculture should take the form of a 
woman but so long as primitive man was taken 
up with hunting and fighting, it was natural 
that woman should be the first agriculturist. 
There is further a magical reason for this. In 
his History of the New World (II. p. 8) Mr. 


[79] 


MYTHOLOGY 


Edward J. Payne tells us that in America prim- 
itive man refused to interfere in agriculture: 
he thought it magically dependent for success 
on woman and connected with child bearing. 
“When the women plant maize’ said the 
Indian to Gumilla, ‘the stalk produces two 
or three ears; ... Why? Because women 
know how to produce children. They only 
know how to plant the corn so as to ensure its 
germinating. Then let them plant it; they 
know more than we know.’” Just so in the 
story of Demeter the functions of Child-Bearer 
and Seed-Sower are closely interconnected. 

Homer himself as already noted made little 
account of Demeter. In the Jliad (V. 500), 
she stands with her yellow hair at the sacred 
threshing floor, when men are winnowing—and 
“she maketh division of grain and chaff, and 
the heaps of chaff grow white.” Homer knew 
Persephone but not as Koré, not as the daugh- 
ter of the Corn-Mother, only as the dread 
Queen of the Shades below. He knows noth- 
ing of the Rape of Persephone, nor of the 
world-famed Flower-Gathering. 

Homer knew nothing, at least he says 
nothing of 


[80] 





DEMETER AND KORE 


“that fair field 
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers, 
Herself a fawrer flower, by gloomy Dis 
Was gathered—which cost Ceres all that pain 
To seek her through the world.’ 1 


It is not Homer who cries: 


“O, Proserpina 
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou letst fall 
From Dis’s waggon!’ 1 


The modern poet sees deeper. It is as the 
daughter of her mother Earth that the Queen 
of the Shades below makes appeal to us, 
beckons us to her kingdom. 


“OQ daughter of Earth, of my mother, her crown 
and blossom of birth, 

I am also, I also, thy brother: I go, as I came, 
unto earth. 

In the night where thine eyes are as moons are 
in heaven, the might where thou art, 

Where the silence is more than all tunes, and 
where sleep overflows from the heart, 

Where the poppies are sweet as the rose im our 
world, and the red rose is white, 

And the wind falls faint as it blows, with the 
fume of the flower of the mght, 


[Sr] 


MYTHOLOGY 


And the murmur of spirits that sleep im the 
shadow of gods from afar 

Grows dim in thine ears and deep, as the deep dim 
soul of a star, 

In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens 
untrod by the sun, 

Let my soul with their souls find place, and for- 
get what is done or undone, 

Thou art more than the Gods, who number the 
days of our temporal breath, 

For these give labour and slumber, but thou, 
Proserpina, death,” *° 


In all the range of English poetry there is 
perhaps no fairer figure than that of Proser- 
pine, and assuredly none more august. 


“Pale, beyond porch and portal, 
Crowned with calm leaves, she stands 
And gathers all things mortal 
With cold wmmortal hands; 
Her languid lips are sweeter 
Than Love’s, who fears to greet her, 
To men that mix and meet her 
From many times and lands. 


She waits for each and other, 
She waits for all men born; 

Forgets the Earth her mother, 
The life of fruits and corn; 


[82] 


DEMETER AND KORE 


And spring and seed and swallow 

Take wing for her, and follow 

Where summer song rings hollow, 
And flowers are put to scorn.” 4 


The two figures of the Mother and the Maid 
differentiate more and more, and their func- 
tions tend to specialize, and on the whole the 
mother takes more the physical side, the 
daughter the spiritual. 

If Homer seems to neglect Demeter, ample 
amends are made by the writer of the Homeric 
Hymn who tells the whole story of the Flower 
gathering and the Rape and the Mourning of 
the Mother in great detail and in language of 
singular beauty. The Hymn, the manuscript 
of which is now at Leyden, was found in 1777 
in a farmyard at Moscow. Demeter’s own 
sacred pigs had preserved it. It begins almost 
abruptly with the Flower-Gathering: 


“Demeter of the beauteous hair, goddess divine, 
I sing, 

Her and the slender-ankled maid, her daughter, 
whom the King 

Aidoneus seized by Zeus’ decree. He found her, 
as she played 

Far from her mother’s side, who reaps the corn 
with golden blade.” 


[83 ] 


MYTHOLOGY 


The scene was laid in the vale of Enna in 
Sicily and so Matthew Arnold has it: 


“O easy access to the hearer’s grace 

When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine! 

For she herself had trod Sicilian fields, 

She knew the Dorian water's gush divine, 

She knew each lily white which Enna yields, 

Each Rose with blushing face ; 

She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian train. 

But ah, of our poor Thames she never heard! 

Her foot the Cumner cowslip never stirred; 
And we should tease her with our plaint in 

Vay) 3? 


The poet of the Hymn goes on: 


“She culled the flowers along the mead, she and 
the daughters far 

Deep-girdled of Okeanos, roses and crocus there; 

Pale violets, fags and hyacinths, narcissus set a 
snare 

Of earth by Zeus’ decree that he, to whose House 
all men fare, 

Might lure the maid of flower-like face, and have 
his will of her.” 


And here the poet pauses to tell of the won- 
ders of the narcissus, a flower in use in the 
underworld, worn by the Semne as their “an- 
cient crown.” 


[84] 





ee 


—————  ———— 


DEMETER AND KORE 


The story goes on: 


“The maid amazed stretched out her hands to 
take the lovely thing, 

The wide earth yawned on Nysa’s plain and 
where it yawned, the King 

Straightway upsprang and caught the maid and 
sore against her will 

He, Polydegmon, bore her off in his gold wain, 
and shrill 

Shrieked she and called on father Zeus, most 
righteous and most high, 

But no god heard the maiden’s voice and no man 
came nigh.” 


And then comes the mourning of Demeter. 
Nine days she wandered far and wide, seek- 
ing her daughter with flaming torches, till at 
last she came to Eleusis. 

Here follows the long and beautiful episode 
of the rearing of the child Demophon by De- 
meter, disguised as an old serving woman. 
The episode was full of meaning to the Greeks, 
because the goddess was to them always Kou- 
rotrophos, the Child-rearer, but to us who no 
longer connect seed-sowing and child-bearing 
it has lost much of its significance. At last 
Demeter casts aside her disguise and in a 


[85] 


MYTHOLOGY 


splendid speech to the people of Eleusis pro- 
claims her godhead: 


“T am Demeter, honoured name, a sovran joy 
and praise 
To gods and mortal men. Come ye and bid 
the folk upraise 
A temple great and altar place, below the citadel 
High walled, anigh the jutting cliff—, beside 
the dancers’ Well. 
Myself will teach my rites and ye, henceforth 
with pious mind 
Shall do them and henceforth my grace to you 
shall be inclined. | 
Then as she spake—the goddess cast away her 
stature old 
And changed her shape in wondrous wise, and 
beauty manifold 
She breathed around. From forth her robe a 
perfumed fragrance shed 
That makes the heart to yearn. Her golden hair 
about her head 
Streamed and her flesh celestial through the 
goodly chambers glowed— 
Like lightning fire from forth the halls, straight- 
way the goddess strode. 


The women, thro’ the livelong night trembling 
and sore afraid 


[86] 


DEMETER AND KORE 


Tended the boy in vain, and to the glorious god- 
dess prayed.” 78 


The goodly temple was builded and the rites 
established, but the goddess bereft of her 
daughter still dwelt apart and the earth was 
barren and desolate. Terrible years of famine 
did the goddess bring upon mortal, for the 
earth would not send up her seed and the oxen 
dragged the crooked ploughs in vain through 
the furrows. At last Hermes was sent down 
to Hades to bring back Persephone, but the 
crafty King gave her to eat of the pomegran- 
ate fruit and she that eats of the underworld 
food must thither return. And so was made 
the pact of the seasons for a portion of the 
year; for the wintertime Persephone must 
abide with her dread husband in the under- 
world, but for two parts, spring and summer, 
she should dwell with her mother and the other 
Immortals: 


“So they spake. And forthwith did Demeter the 
garlanded yield 

And straightway she let grow the fruits of the 
loamy field.” 


And Demeter herself came back to the corn- 
field: 


[87] 


MYTHOLOGY 


“Once more the reaper, in the gleam of dawn, 
Will see me by the landmark far away, 
Blessing his field, or seated in the dusk 

Of even, by the lonely threshing-foor, 
Rejoicing in the harvest and the grange.” *4 


And the labourer could pray anew: 


“O once again may it be mine to plant 

The great fan on her corn heap, while She stands, 

Smiling, with sheaves and poppies in her 
hands.”’ *® 


The seasons every year come round in their 


due order; only in Greece did they give birth 
to human images so lovely. 


[88] 





V. THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES AS 
GIFT-GIVERS: HERA, ATHENA, 
APHRODITE 


Few myths are more familiar than the 
Judgment of Paris. 


“Goddesses three to Ida came, 
Immortal strife to settle there— 
Which was the fairest of the three, 
And which the prize of beauty should bear.” 


HE kernel of the myth according to 
this form of the story is a Rallisteion 
or beauty contest. When the gods 

were assembled at the wedding of Peleus 
and Thetis, Eris, Strife, threw among them 
a golden apple. On it was inscribed, “Let 
the fair one take it,” or, as some said, ‘The 
apple for the fair one.” The three great 
goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite betake 
themselves for judgment to the young shep- 
herd Paris, King Priam’s son. 

The scene is figured on countless ancient 
vases but on one and one only is it figured as 


[89 ] 


MYTHOLOGY 


a Judgment. The design in question is 
from a late red-figured crater in the Biblio- 
théque Nationale in Paris. The goddesses are 
grouped round the young Phrygian shepherd 
and in characteristic fashion they are prepar- 
ing for a beauty contest, while Hermes, who 
has brought them, tells to Paris his mission. 
Hera is gazing well satisfied in a mirror and 
sets her veil in order; Aphrodite stretches out 
her fair arm that a love-god may fasten a 
“bracelet of gold on her flesh’; and Athena, 
watched only by a large serious faithful dog, 
goes to a little fountain shrine and, clean god- 
dess as she is, tucks her gown about her and 
has a good wash. 
And in our hearts we cry with CEnone: 


“““C) Paris; 
Give it to Pallas!’ but he heard me not, 
Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me!’ * 


In every other representation of the scene not 
only is the apple absent as even here but the 
scene depicted is not a beauty-contest at all but 
a choice of gifts offered to Paris. Each of the 
three goddesses indifferently holds flowers 
or fruit, but these are simply decorations, at- 
tributes. The three goddesses are gift-givers, 


[90] 


a 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


grace-givers and they each offer in turn their 
characteristic gifts to Paris; it is for him to 
choose and on his choice depends the issue of 
the Trojan war. But before Paris was there, 
the eternal motive of the Choice was there, the 
Choice that comes more or less to each and 
every man. The exact elements of the 
“Choice” vary; Athena is sometimes Wisdom, 
sometimes War, Hera is grandeur or royalty, 
Aphrodite always love and Beauty. The late 
Alexandrian and Roman story is by the right 
understanding of it redeemed from the vulgar- 
ity inherent in a beauty contest and compli- 
cated by the further vulgarity of a bribe. But 
more than that; we begin to understand what 
each and all of these maiden-goddesses are, 
they are Charites, Grace-bringers, Gift-givers, 
and they themselves,—all forms of the earth- 
mother are only distinguishable by their gifts, 
—they are in fact their own gifts and graces 
incarnate. 

It is not only in the so-called “Judgment of 
Paris” that the three goddesses appear as gift- 
givers. We find them dowering mortals in the 
Odyssey, the daughters of Pandareus, but not 
this time as rivals. A fourth, Artemis, is their 
helper. 


Lor] 


MYTHOLOGY 


Homer puts the story into the mouth of 
Penelope, who tells of Pandareus’ daughters: 


“Their father and their mother dear died by the 
gods’ high doom, 

The maidens were left orphans, alone within their 
home ; 

Fair Aphrodite gave them curds and honey of the 
bee 

And lovely wine, and Hera made them very fair 
to see, 

And wise beyond all women-folk. And holy 
Artemis 

Made them to wax in stature, and Athene for 
their bliss 

Taught them all glorious handiworks of woman’s 
artifice.” 27 


The gifts are here distributed rather differ- 
ently. Hera, not Athena, gave wisdom and 
Aphrodite gives only honey and curds to these 
maidens too young for love, but it may be that 
the figures of the Gift-givers had not as yet 
completely crystallized. We will take them in 
order. 


1. HERA 


It may seem strange to find Hera among 
the maidens: she is to us all wife and Queen; 


[92] 





THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


in fact by her marriage with Zeus she becomes 
the typical Bride and their Holy Marriage is 
at once the prototype and the consecration of 
all human wedlock. But the name Hera 
means Year and there is not wanting evidence 
that she was at first the Year, the fruits of 
the Year incarnate. In far away Arcadia, 
where things still went on in primitive fashion, 
Hera, at Stymphalus, had three surnames and 
three corresponding sanctuaries. She was 
called and worshipped as Child, when married 
she was called Teleia, the Full Grown, and 
last she had her sanctuary as Chera, Widow. 
The symbolism of the three surnames is trans- 
parent. In the Spring season, she is Child 
or maiden, in Summer and Autumn she is Full 
Grown, and in Winter she is a Widow. Her 
desolation is like the mourning of Demeter. 
Hera, then, as Year goddess, stood for the 
three seasons, figured as the three stages of a 
woman’s life. At her Sacred Marriage, 
Homer (J/., XIV. 347 ff.) tells us: “beneath 
them the divine earth sent forth fresh new 
grass and dewy lotus and crocus and hyacinth 
thick and soft, that raised them aloft from 
the ground. Therein they lay and were clad 
on with a fair golden cloud whence fell drops 


[93] 


MYTHOLOGY 


of glittering dew.” It is the very image of the 
fertility of early summer. 

But there was another side. Signs are not 
lacking that this marriage of Hera with Zeus 
was a forced alliance and certainly not from 
the beginning. Long before her connection 
with Zeus she had, as a great matrilinear god- 
dess like the Earth-Mother, reflected the sea- 
sons of the year and the stages of woman’s 
life. In the old Argonautic legend Hera is 
Queen in her own right of Thessaly and pa- 
tron, in the old matriarchal fashion, of the 
hero Jason. She, the old Pelasgian Queen, is 
the really dominant power. The marriage of 
Zeus and Hera is in fact a forcible one and it 
reflects the subjugation of the indigenous peo- 
ple by incoming Northerners. Only thus can 
we account for the fact that the divine hus- 
band and wife are in constant unseemly con- 
flict. Of course a human motive is alleged; 
Hera is jealous, Zeus in constant exasperation. 
But the real reason is a racial conflict. The 
worshippers of Zeus and Hera, Achzeans and 
Argives, were after long conflict barely recon- 
ciled. In actual cult, Hera reigned alone in 
the great Argive Herzum, alone also at Samos, 
her temple even at Olympia is far older and 


[94] 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


quite distinct from that of Zeus. In Homer 
she is represented as the jealous and quarrel- 
some wife; really, she is the image, the pro- 
jection of the turbulent nation princess 
coerced, but never really subdued by an alien 
conqueror. The real, shadow wife is Dione, 
abandoned by Zeus at Dodona when he en- 
tered Greece. It is perhaps for this reason 
that ox-eyed Hera fails to make lasting appeal 
to either art or literature. 


u. ATHENA 


It is quite other with Athena. As Professor 
Gilbert Murray has well said: “Athena is an 
ideal and a mystery: the ideal of wisdom, of 
incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, 
seen through the light of some mystic and spir- 
itual devotion like, but transcending the love 
of man for woman.” If the claim of Hera to 
be Maiden be doubtful, there is no question 
in Athena’s case; she is the Parthenos, the 
Maiden, her temple the Parthenon. Natural 
motherhood she renounced, but she is foster- 
mother of heroes, and their constant guardian 
and guide; such is her relationship to Theseus, 


[95] 


MYTHOLOGY 


to Perseus, to Heracles and to Erichthonius. 

It should be noted at the outset that her 
name in its full form, Athenaia, is adjectival; 
she is She of Athens, the Athenian maid, 
“Pallas, our Lady of Athens.” Plato in the 
Laws (796) clearly expresses this. He is 
speaking of the armed Athena and says: “me- 
thinks our Koré and Mistress who dwells 
among us, joying her in the sport of dancing, 
was net minded to play with empty hands, 
but adorned her with her panoply and thus ac- 
complished her dance, and it is fitting that in 
this our youths and maidens should imitate.” 
Plato’s psychology was that of his own day; 
naturally he inverts the order of procedure. 
It was Athena who “imitated” her maidens 
and youths, she who was the incarnation of 
their every thought and action, dancing in ar- 
mour as they danced, fighting as they fought. 
To write the story of the making of Athena 
is to trace the spiritual history of the city of 
Athens. 

Athena, at the outset, like Mother-Earth 
from whom she sprang, was closely linked with 
the life of plants and animals. Her attendant 
bird was the owl which still, if we climb the 
Acropolis at moonlight, may be heard and 


[96] 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


seen hooting among the ruins. The image of 
the owl was stamped on Athenian coins. 
Athena’s “owls” were current far and wide. 
Still more intimately associated with her was 
the snake, again a survival from her aspect as 
Earth goddess. The “house-guarding’ snake 
was, it may be conjectured, the earliest form 
of every local Koré. At Athens the snake 
was the fate, the guardian genius of the city 
before that genius took on human form. 
Herodotus (VIII. 41. 3) tells us how when the 
Persians besieged the city, the guardian snake 
left untasted its honeycake, the sacrificial food 
offered to it month by month, and when the 
priestess told the people of the portent, the 
Athenians the more readily and eagerly for- 
sook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the 
goddess had abandoned their citadel. On a 
late red-figured lecythus in the Central Mu- 
seum at Athens is a representation of the Judg- 
ment or rather Choice of Paris. Only one 
goddess is present, Athena. By her side 
stands a great snake, equal to the goddess in 
height and majesty. The vase-painter seems 
dimly aware that goddess and divine snake are 
one. In the masterpiece of Phidias, the great 
chryselephantine statue of Athena, beneath 


L977] 


MYTHOLOGY 


her shield still crouched the guardian snake. 
Yet more sacred and intimate is her associa- 
tion with the olive: 


“The holy bloom of the olive, whose hoar leaf 
High in the shadowy shrine of Pandrosus 
Hath honor of us all,” 


as Swinburne has it in his Erechtheus. 

Long ago the Chorus in the Gdipus at Col- 
onus of Sophocles chanted the glory of the 
olive tree of Athens: 


“And this country for her own has what no Asian 
land hath known, 

Nor ever yet in the great Dorian Pelops island 
has it grown, 

The untended, the self-planted, self-defended 
from the foe, 

Sea-gray, children-nurturing olive tree that here 
delights to grow. 

None may take, nor touch, nor harm it, head- 
strong youth nor age grown bold, 

For the Round of Morian Zeus has been its 
watcher from of old; 

He beholds it and Athena, thine own sea-gray 
eyes behold.” *® 


Pausanias (I. 27. 2) says that the olive tree 
was produced by the goddess at the time of her 


[98 ] 


Ee 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


contest for the land, as a token of her power, 
but, he adds, there is also a story that the 
tree was burnt to the ground when the Persians 
set fire to the city of the Athenians and that 
after it had been burnt down, it sprang up 
and grew as much as two cubits in a day. 
The olive tree it is clear was the fate, the 
Moira, of the city, intimately bound up with its 
life. 

Poseidon and Athena fought for the city of 
Athens: 


“A noise is arisen against her of waters 
A sound as of battle came up from the sea.” 


Strife, bitter strife 


“Twixt god and god had risen which heavenlier 


name 
Should here stand hallowed, whose more liberal 


grace 
Should win this city’s worship, and own land 
To which of these do reverence.” 


Poseidon with his trident smote the Acropolis 
rock and forth there sprang a well of strange 
bright brine; he brought forth the horse, but 
Athena set for her sign the olive tree. 

The high gods met in judgment and they 


[99] 


MYTHOLOGY 


“Gave great Pallas the strife’s fair stake, 

The Lordship and care of the lovely land, 

The grace of the town that hath on it for crown 
But a headband to wear 
Of violets one-hued with her hair, 

For the vales and the green, high places of earth 
Hold nothing so fair, 

And the depths of the sea know no such birth 
Of the manifold births they bear.” 


In terms of pre-history, what the famous 
strife means is this: Athena was the maiden 
of the oldest stratum of population, before the 
incoming of the Minoans. Poseidon stands al- 
ways for the Minoan aristocracy, wealthy, 
haughty. The rising democracy revived the 
ancient maiden figure, but transmuted her 
whole being and made her an incarnation of 
the new, free, democratic city. 


“Dear city of men without master or lord, 

Fair fortress and fostress of sons born free, 
Who stand in her sight and in thine, O Sun, 
Slaves of no man, subjects of none; 

A wonder enthroned on the hills and the sea, 

A maiden crowned with a fourfold glory, 

That none from the pride of her head may rend. 
Violet and olive leaf, purple and hoary, 


[100] 


a 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


Song wreath and story, the fairest of fame, 
Flowers that the winter can blast not or bend; 
A light upon earth as the sun’s own flame, 

A name as his name, 

Athens, a praise without end.” ?° 


The real object of adoration to the Athenian 
was not a goddess but the city herself, ‘im- 
mortal mistress of a band of lovers,” and in 
the passion of this adoration they would lift 
her from all earthly contact, they would not 
have her born as other mortals. 


“Her life, as the lightning, was flashed from the 
light of her Father's head.” 


It is this that lends to the figure of Athena 
an aloofness, that makes of her, for all her 
beauty, something of an abstraction, an un- 
reality; she is Reason, Light and Liberty, a 
city 

“Based on a crystalline sea 

Of thought and its eternity.” 


mr. APHRODITE AND ERos 


Perhaps in contemplating the figure of 
Athena we have been conscious of a certain 


[ror | 


MYTHOLOGY 


strain, a certain contradiction, and that after 
all, as Althza says, 


“A woman, armed, makes war upon herself, 
Unwomanlike, and treads down use and wont 
And the sweet common honour that she hath, 
Love, and the cry of children, and the hand 
Trothplight and mutual mouth of marriages.” *° 
If so, we turn with relief to the figure of Aph- 
rodite which has not only a singular loveliness 
but a singular simplicity and unity. 


“We have seen thee, O Love, thou are fair: thou 
art goodly, O Love, 

Thy wings make light in the ar, as the wings of 
a dove, 

Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the 
sea; 

Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of 
thee.” 


Aphrodite is, perhaps, the fairest of all the 
forms of the Earth-Mother; like her, she has 
a sacred bird, the dove, and like her she has a 
son, the attribute of Motherhood, Eros. Let 
the Mother come first. 

Aphrodite is maiden in her perennial radi- 


[102] 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


ance, but virgin she is not. Rather she is the 
eternal Nymphe, the Bride, but the bride of 
the old matrilinear order, intolerant of patri- 
archal monogamy. Once admitted to Olym- 
pus, a regulation husband had to be found for 
her, the craftsman Hephestus, but the link is 
plainly artificial. Always in Olympus she is 
something of an alien, perhaps because it was 
realized that she came from Cyprus. Homer 
(Od., VIII. 361 ff.), when Ares and Aphrodite 
escape from the snare set them, says: 


“Straightway forth sprang the twain; 

To savage Thrace went Ares, but Cypris with 
sweet smile 

Hied her to her fair altar place in pleasant Paphos 
isle.” 


Ares and Aphrodite have no link in ritual, 
but are the two counter-powers of Strife and 
Harmony; philosophy made of them meta- 
phorical use. It is to a Roman poet and a 
Roman philosopher, using Greek material, that 
we owe the august image of Venus Genetrix, 
mistress of Mars, the War-God; and to their 
marriage (to his mind) was due the Pax 
Romana. 


[103 ] 


MYTHOLOGY 


“Of Rome, the Mother, of men and gods the 
pleasure, 

Fostering Venus, under heaven's gliding signs 

Thou the ship-bearing sea, fruit-bearing land 

Still hauntest, since by thee each living thing 

Takes life and birth and sees the light of the Sun. 


Thee goddess, the winds fly from, thee the clouds 
And thine approach, for thee the dedal earth 
Sends up sweet flowers, the ocean levels smile 
And heaven shines with floods of light appeased. 


Thou, since alone thou rulest all the world, 
Nor without thee can any living thing 

Win to the shores of light and love and joy, 
Goddess, bid thou throughout the seas and land 
The works of furious Mars quieted cease.” * 


Touched though the words are with a stiff maj- 
esty that is all Roman, yet the thought is 
wholly Greek. Just such a figure is Aphro- 
dite, in the Homeric Hymn, when “she came 
to many-fountained Ida, she, the mother of 
wild beasts, and made straight for the stead- 
ing in the mountain, while behind her came 
fawning the beasts, grey wolves and lions, 
fiery eyed, and bears and swift pards, insati- 
ate pursuers of the roe-deer. Glad was she 


[104] 


EE 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


at the sight of them and sent desire into their 
breasts.” She is the mother of all life 
throughout the world, a veritable “Lady of the 
Wild Things.” 

She was goddess of life upon the earth, but 
especially goddess of the sea, as became her 
island birth: 


“For the West Wind breathed to Cyprus and 
lifted her tenderly 

And bore her down the billow and the stream of 
the sounding sea 

In a cup of delicate foam. And the Hours in 
wreaths of gold 

Uprose in joy as she came, and laid on her, fold 
on fold, 

Fragrant raiment immortal, and a crown on her 
deathless head.” *° 


She is of the upper air as well as of the sea, 
and on a cylix with white ground, in the Brit- 
ish Museum, the vase-painting in a design of 
marvellous beauty and delicacy has set her 
to sail through heaven on a great swan. Aph- 
rodite is, I think, the only goddess who in 
passing to the upper air did not lose some- 
thing of her humanity and reality. It may 
be that as knowledge and command over things 


[105] 


MYTHOLOGY 


natural advanced, the mystery and godhead of 
nature was more and more lost in science. 
But the mystery of life and of love, that begets 





Figure 5 
Aphrodite and Erotes 


life, remains unsolved and the godhead of 
Aphrodite remains. 

Perhaps the loveliest and certainly the most 
significant of the images of Aphrodite in an- 
cient art is on a red-figured cylix in the Berlin 
Museum (Fig. 5), signed by the master 


[ 106] 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


Hieron. It is part of a representation of the 
“Choice” of Paris. Aphrodite stands erect in 
flowing drapery and veiled, under her left arm 
is her dove. All around her head play her 
children, the Erdtes. And what are the 
Erétes? Who and what is Eros? He is a 
life spirit, as unlike as possible to the fat, idle 
Cupid of the Romans. When a man dies, his 
spirit, his life-force escapes from his mouth 
in the guise of a small winged figure, a Ker, 
as the Greeks called it; just such a Ker, only 
of Life, is Erds. He is no idle, impish urchin, 
still less is he the romantic passion between 
man and woman, he is just the spirit of life, 
a thing to man with his moral complexity 
sometimes fateful and even terrible, but to 
young things in spring, to live plants and ani- 
mals a thing glad and kind. So the vase- 
painter figured love,—a winged sprite, carry- 
ing a flowering branch over land and sea. So 
Theognis wrote: 


“Love comes at his hour, comes with the flowers 
of spring, 
Leaving the land of his birth, 
Kypros, beautiful isle. Love comes, scattering 
Seed for man upon earth.” * 


[107 ] 


MYTHOLOGY 


The winged Erétes hover about Aphrodite, car- 
rying flower sprays and wreathes, bringing 
gifts to the gift-giver, they too being spirits of 
Grace and Life. 

Erés is everywhere, he moves upon the face 
of the waters, he hides in a maiden’s cheek. 
The Chorus in the Antigone sing: 


“O Thou of War unconquered, thou Eros, 
Spoiler of garnered gold, who liest lid 
In a girl’s cheek, under the dreaming ld, 

While the long night-time flows, 
O rover of the seas, O terrible one, 
In wastes and wild wood-caves 
None may escape thee, none: 
Not of the heavenly Gods, who live alway, 
Not of bad men, who vanish ere the day: 
And he who finds thee, raves.” *4 


It is worth noting that as the Earth-Mother 
developed into a Trinity of Grace-Givers, so 
Erés develops a triple form. On a red-figured 
stamnus in the British Museum, we have three 
beautiful Love-gods, figured flying over the 
sea; they are Erds, Himeros (Longing) and 
Pothos (Regret); they carry, one, a hare, the 
love-gift of the Greeks, one, a flowering 
branch, one, a tenia or ribbon-like scarf. On 


[ 108 ] 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


the reverse of the vase are figured the three 
Sirens and possibly the three Sirens suggested 
the three Erodtes. But the triple form took 
no permanent hold on either art or literature. 

To some extent at Athens, owing to the 
poignant character of attachments between 
man and man, Aphrodite suffered eclipse and 
Erés her son became dominant. Alcman’s 
words seem to be for a time realized: 


“There 1s no Aphrodite. Hungry Love 
Plays, boy-like, with light feet upon the 
flowers.” 


The art-type of Erdés, as ephebus, is perfected 
about this time. Still even in the fifth century 
B.cC., the noblest hymns to Erés were inspired 
by the love of man for woman. 

Such is the hymn, chanted by the Chorus in 
the Hippolytus of Euripides: 


“Eros, Erdés, who blindest, tear by tear, 
Men’s eyes with hunger; thou swift Foe, that 
pliest 
Deep in our hearts joy like an edgéd spear; 
Come not to me with Evil, haunting near, 
Wrath on the wind, nor jarring of the clear 
Wings’ music as thou fliest! 


[109] 


MYTHOLOGY 


There 1s no shaft that burneth, not in fire, 

Not in wild stars, far off and flinging fear, 

As in thine hands the shaft of All Desire, 
Erés, Child of the Highest!’ 


We have travelled far from the gentle Life 
Spirits carrying flowers. 

Another choric hymn in the Hippolytus 
seems equally addressed to Mother and Son: 


“Thou comest to bend the pride 
Of the hearts of God and man, 
Cypris; and by thy side, 
In earth-encircling span, 
He of the changing plumes, 
The Wing that the world illumes, 
As over the leagues of land flies he, 
Over the salt and sounding sea. 


For mad is the heart of Love, 

And gold the gleam of his wing; 
And all to the spell thereof 

Bend, when he makes his spring; 
All life that 1s wild and young 

In mountain and wave and stream, 
All that of earth is sprung, 

Or breathes in the red sunbeam; 


[110] 


THE MAIDEN-GODDESSES 


Yea, and Mankind. O’er all a royal throne, 
Cyprian, Cyprian, is thine alone!” *® 


And with the figure of Aphrodite comes back 
the ancient glory of the Earth-Mother. 


[ri7] 


OV Loa EMIS 


HE figure of Artemis is in a sense more 
primitive than that of either Athena 
or Aphrodite. She is nearer akin to 

the “Lady of the Wild Things.” Her local 
cults are not without traces of primitive sav- 
agery. Pausanias (VII. 18. 12) tells us of a 
yearly holocaust offered to Artemis at Patre, 
which exactly resembled that of the Great- 
Mother at Hierapolis. After describing the 
altar surrounded by a circle of green logs of 
wood and approached by an inclined plane 
made of earth, he tells of the procession of the 
virgin priestess in a car drawn by deer. Of 
the sacrifice itself he says it was not merely 
a state affair but popular among private peo- 
ple. “For they bring and cast upon the altar 
living things of all sorts both edible birds. and 
all manner of victims, also wild boars and deer 
and fawns and some even bring the cubs of 
wolves and bears, and others full grown beasts. 
I saw indeed a bear and other beasts struggling 


[112] 


ARTEMIS 


to get out of the first force of the flames and 
escaping by sheer strength. But those who 
threw them in drag them up again on to the 
fire, I never heard of any one being wounded 
by the wild beasts.” Even in the civilized 
days of Pausanias the service of the Huntress 
maid was horrible and bloodthirsty. It is well 
perhaps for once to realize from what im- 
minent savagery the Olympian divinities had 
emerged. 

Compare with this the ritual of the Great 
Mother at Hierapolis, as observed by Pau- 
sanias (IV. 32.6). In the court of the sanctu- 
ary were kept all manner of beasts and birds. 
“Consecrated oxen, horses, eagles, bears and 
lions who never hurt any one but are holy and 
tame to handle.” But these tame holy beasts 
were kept for a horrid purpose! Lucian (de 
Syr. Dea, 49) thus describes the holocaust: 
“Of all the festivals, the greatest that I know 
of they hold at the beginning of the spring. 
Some call it the Pyre, and some the Torch. 
At this festival they do as follows. They cut 
down great trees and set them up in the court- 
yard. Then they bring sheep and goats and 
other live beasts and hang them up on the 
trees. They also bring birds and clothes and 


[113] 


MYTHOLOGY 


vessels of gold and silver. When they have 
made all ready, they carry the victims round 
the trees and set fire to them and straightway 
they are all burned.” And again at Messene, 
Pausanias (IV. 31. 7) saw the same horrid 
ritual. He tells us of “a hall of the Curetes, 
where they sacrifice without distinction all 
animals, beginning with oxen and goats and 
ending with birds; they throw them all into the 
fire.’ And who are the Curetes? Who but 
the young men, the ministrants of the Great- 
Mother. 

The sacrifice at Messene to Laphria is 
scarcely less horrible than that of Tauris, 
where the local goddess demanded human 
blood. Against this the later conscience of 
Greece revolted. Euripides (Jlphigenia in 
Tauris) makes Iphigenia, doomed to sacrifice 
her brother, cry out against Artemis: 


“Herself doth drink this blood of slaughtered 
men? 

Could ever Leto, she of the great King 

Beloved, be mother to so gross a thing? 

These tales be false, false as those feastlings 
wild 

Of Tantalus and Gods that love a child. 


[114] 


ARTEMIS 


This land of murderers to its god hath given 
Its own lust: evil dwelleth not in heaven.” 


Again the Leader of the chorus protests that 
human sacrifice is no Greek offering and thus 
adjures the goddess: 


“O holy one, tf it atford 
Thee joy, what these men bring to thee, 
Take thou their sacrifice, which we 

By law of Hellas, hold abhorred.”’ 


Artemis herself, the story went, had substi- 
tuted in her sacrifice a fawn for the maiden 
Iphigenia. Iphigenia cries: 


“Tell him that Artemis my soul did save, 

I wot not how, and to the altar gave 

A fawn instead; the which my father slew, 
Not seeing, deeming that the sword he drew 
Struck me. But she had borne me far away 
And left me in this land.” *° 


These substitution stories;,—the fawn for 
Iphigenia, the ram for Isaac,—all mark the 
transition from human to animal sacrifice. 
The next rite, though very primitive shows 
Artemis in gentler guise. On the Acropolis 
at Athens was a precinct of Artemis Brauronia 


[115] 


MYTHOLOGY 


and in it an image made by Praxiteles. 
Within this precinct went on the arkteia or 
“bear-service.” In the Lysistrata of Aristoph- 
anes (641) the chorus of women sing of the 
benefits they have received from the state and 
how they were reared at its expense. “As 
soon as I was seven years old I became an 
Errephorus, then when I was ten, I was grinder 
to our Sovereign Lady, then, wearing the saf- 
fron robe, J was a bear in the Brauronian fes- 
tival.” In Arcadia it does not surprise us to 
find that Artemis herself, bearing the euphe- 
mistic title of Calliste, “the fairest,” was a 
bear, nor that one of her faithless worshippers 
was turned into a bear. Among the rude 
dwellers in Arcadia a bear may well have been 
a creature greatly to be dreaded and most 
eagerly to be propitiated. But in the Chris- 
tian era to find in civilized Athens on her sa- 
cred hill a bear cult is a striking instance of 
the tenacity of ancient tradition. The pre- 
cinct must have been a strange sight; the little 
girls of Athens wrapped in yellow bear skins 
would dance or crouch bear fashion before the 
goddess. <A goat was sacrificed to Artemis and 
till the next festival the little girls were safe 
from marriage. They had accomplished their 


[116] 


ARTEMIS 


bear-service. After a while it would seem 
they got shy of the rude ritual, since, by the 
time of Aristophanes, for the bear skin was 
substituted a saffron robe and henceforth we 
hear more of the dedication of raiment than 
the dancing of bears. But always these well- 
born, well-bred little Athenian girls who 
danced as bears to Artemis must to the end of 
their days have thought reverently of the 
might of the Great-She-Bear. Among the 
Apaches to-day we are told “only ill-bred 
Americans, or Europeans who have never had 
any ‘raising’ would think of speaking of the 
Bear, or indeed even of the Snake without 
employing the reverential prefix ‘Ostin,’ 
meaning Old One, the equivalent of the Roman 
‘Senator.’ ” 

The first time I visited Athens I was turning 
over the fragments in the Acropolis Museum, 
then little more than a lumber room. In a 
rubbish pile in the corner of the room I had 
the great happiness to light on the small stone 
figure of a bear. One furry paw was stick- 
ing out and caught my eye. Some maiden 
richer or more pious than the rest had offered 
to the goddess this image of herself, a small 
bear comfortably seated on its hind legs. Pre- 


[117] 


MYTHOLOGY 


cisely where the bear was discovered I failed 
to find out, but originally she must have been 
set up in the Brauronian precinct. 

It seems probable that from the holocaust 
service arose the figure of the Huntress Arte- 
mis; she, in whose honour the wild and tame 
beasts were slain, became herself the slayer. 
In Homer uniformly Artemis is the Huntress. 
When the Calydonians (//., IX. 533) fail to 
bring their Hecatomb, it is the Archer-God- 
dess who ‘‘was wroth and sent against them a 
creature of heaven, a fierce wild boar, white- 
tusked, that wrought sore ill continually on 
Oineus’ garden land,” and it is the Maiden- 
Huntress of Calydon that the chorus in the 
Atalanta hail: 


“Come with bows bent and with emptying of 
quivers, 
Maiden most perfect, lady of light, 
With a noise of winds and many rivers, 
With a clamour of waters and with might; 
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet, 
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet; 
For the faint east quickens, the wan west 
shivers, 
Round the feet of the day and the feet of the 


night.” 8" 
[118] 


ARTEMIS 


It may surprise us perhaps that a woman 
goddess is chosen by the Greeks to be hunts- 
man in chief. Assuredly the cloistered Greek 
woman did not, modern fashion, join the chase. 
But the difficulty disappears, if we remember 
that the aspect of huntress was taken over 
from the ‘Lady of the Wild Things” and prob- 
ably by way of the holocaust. 

Artemis is not only Slayer of the wild beasts. 
She shares with Apollo the ministry of death 
to mortals. In the Odyssey Homer tells of 
the fair island of Syria, a good land, 


“with oxen and with sheep 
Well stored, and laden vines and cornfields deep, 
And hunger never comes upon the folk, 
Nor sore diseases that make mortals weep. 
But to the tribes of men, when old they grow 
Therein, the Archer of the silver bow, 
Apollo, comes with Artemis, and thus 
With shafts that hurt not strikes and lays them 

FOUN oe 


Artemis may have her aspect as death-dealer to 
women merely as the correlative of Apollo; on 
the other hand it is perhaps more likely that 
she here reflects the darker underworld side 
of the Earth-Mother. 


[119] 


MYTHOLOGY 


One aspect of Artemis is undoubtedly that 
of the Moon. It should be observed that as 
soon as the Greeks or any other people come 
to realize that the seasons are controlled by the 
moon and sun, and that their food supply is 
therefore influenced by these potencies, they 
tend to let their earth divinities take on cer- 
tain attributes of sun and moon. The worship 
of the moon naturally precedes that of the 
sun, because the appearances and disappear- 
ances of the moon, being at shorter intervals, 
naturally first arrested attention. The old er- 
ror of Naturism was to suppose that sun or 
moon exhausted the whole content of a god 
or goddess. The new psychology points out 
that into the content of man’s experiences and 
hence into his expression of that experience 
in the figures of his divinities, there enter at 
a certain stage of civilization elements drawn 
not only from the earth but from the heavenly 
bodies, from sun and moon, and first it would 
seem from moon. The moon is an arresting 
object, a thing of spectral terror, staring with 
dull, pitiless eye. 


“Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! 
“Thinketh, He dwelleth ? the cold o° the moon.” *° 


[120] 


ARTEMIS 


Pheebus is still for us the Sun: 


“Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings 
And Phoebus ’gins arise.” 


And who is Phabe, Artemis, but the Moon 
with silver bow? So Swinburne’s huntsman 
addresses her, in the Atalanta in Calydon: 


“Maiden, and mistress of the months and stars 
Now folded in the flowerless fields of heaven,’ 


and again the chorus: 


“When the hounds of spring are on winter's 
traces, 
The mother of months in meadow or plain 
Fills the shadows and windy places 
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.” 


The moon has her dark and spectral side, 
but this is taken over by Hecate, leaving the 
brightness for Artemis. Hecate is compact of 
magic and spells. In the second Jdyll of The- 
ocritus we have the picture of Simetha, the 
magician,—Simetha who in the anguish of her 
slighted love invokes Hecate, who is also Arte- 
mis, and seeks to lure her lover back by in- 
cantations with the magic wheel on which is 
bound the lynx, the wry-neck. The scene is 


fue] 


MYTHOLOGY 


fitly laid in the moonlight. Simetha sings: 


“Lo! now the barley smoulders in the flame, 
Thestylis, wretch! thy wits are woolgathering! 
Am I a laughing stock, to thee a Shame? 
Scatter the grain, I say, the while I sing; 
‘The bones of Delphis I am scattering; 
Bird, magic Bird bring the man back to me, 


Next do I burn this wax, god helping me, 
So may the heart of Delphis melted be, 
This brazen wheel I whirl, so as before 
Restless may he be whirled about my door. 
‘Bird, magic Bird bring the man home to me, 
Next will I burn these husks. O Artemis 
Hast power hell’s adamant to shatter down 
And every stubborn thing. Hark! Thestyhs, 
Hecate’s hounds are baying up the town, 
The goddess at the crossways. Clash the gong. 


Lo now the sea is still. The winds are still. 
The ache within my heart 1s never still.” 4° 


In the Hippolytus of Euripides, Artemis is 
all huntress-maiden and as such she is sworn 
foe to Aphrodite. It is Aphrodite who speaks 
the prologue and the whole speech is charged 
with the never dying hatred of the voluptuary 
for the ascetic: 


[122] 


a 


ARTEMIS 


“Great among men, and not unnamed am I, 

The Cyprian, in God’s inmost halls on high, 

And wheresoe’er from Pontus to the far 

Red West men dwell, and see the glad day-star, 
And worship Me, the pious heart I bless, 

And wreck that life that lives in stubbornness.” 


And then she tells how Hippolytus, reared in 
strait ways, scorns her and 


“hath dared, alone of all Trozén, 
To hold me least of spirits and most mean, 
And spurns my spell and seeks no woman's kiss. 
But great Apollo’s sister, Artemis, 
He holds of all most high, gives love and praise, 
And through the wild dark woods for ever strays, 
He and the Maid together, with swift hounds 
To slay all angry beasts from out these bounds. 


BB) 


And as the goddess leaves the stage, enter Hip- 
polytus with his huntsmen and Hippolytus 
sings: 
“Follow, O follow me, 
Singing on your ways 
Her in whose hand are we, 
Her whose own flock we be, 
The Zeus-Child, the Heavenly; 
To Artemis be praise!” 


And the huntsmen make answer: 
[123] 


MYTHOLOGY 


“Hail to thee, Maiden blest, 
Proudest and holiest: 

God’s Daughter, great in bliss, 
Leto-born, Artemis! 

Hail to thee, Maiden, far 
Fairest of all that are, 

Yea, and most high thine home, 
Child of the Father’s Hall; 
Hear, O most virginal, 

Hear, O most fair of all, 
In high God’s golden dome.” * 


Artemis in the Hippolytus is austere to the 
point of inhumanity. But her maidenhood 
can take on a gentler and more homely aspect. 
An epigram from the Anthology shows, clearly 
and simply, how in the worship the maiden- 
hood of the worshipper was mirrored: 


“Maid of the Mere, Timareté here brings, 
Before she weds, her cymbals, her dear ball 
To Thee, a Maid, her maiden offerings, 
Her snood, her maiden dolls, their clothes and 
all. 
Hold, Leto’s child, above Timareté 
Thine hand and keep her virginal like thee.’ * 


Note the “before she weds.” It was no per- 
petual virginity that she vowed. 


[124] 


ARTEMIS 


There is a passage in the Hippolytus which 
points to an aspect of Artemis quite other than 
that of the Virgin Huntress and it is of the 
first importance for the full understanding of 
her nature. 

When the huntsmen have ended their chant, 
Hippolytus himself advances to the shrine of 
Artemis, with a wreath in his hand. Arrian in 
his Treatise on Hunting (33) tells us that 
hunters must pay homage to Artemis Agrotera, 
She-of-the-Wild, must pour libation, crown 
her, sing hymns and offer first-fruits of the 
game taken, and must also crown their dogs, 
and that dogs and masters must feast together. 
Hippolytus does not stay to crown his dogs, 
but straightway invokes the goddess thus: 


“Mine own, my one desire, 
Virgin most fair 
Of all the virgin chorr, 
Hail! O most pure, most perfect, loveliest one, 
Lo! in my hand I bear, 
Woven for the circling of thy long, gold hair, 
Culled leaves and flowers from places which the 
sun 
In spring long shines upon. 
Where never shepherd hath driven flock to graze, 
Nor any grass 1s mown; 


[125] 


MYTHOLOGY 


Buf there sound, thro’ all the sunny sweet warm 
days, 
Mid the green holy place, 
The wild bees’ wing alone. 
And maiden reverence tends the fair things there, 
And watereth all of them with sprinkled showers, 
Whoso is chaste of spirit utterly 
May gather there the leaves and fruit and 
flowers ,— 
The unchaste never. 
But thou, O goddess, and dearest love of mine, 
Take and about thine hair 
This anadem entwine 
Take and for my sake wear.” *8 


Great stress is laid of course on the purity 
and sanctity of the garland and the place 
whence it was culled. It is clear, I think, that 
the place was a “garden enclosed” and the gar- 
dens of the ancients were not so much gardens 
for flowers and fruits, as enclosures for the 
growing of medicinal herbs. Medea had such 
a garden full of laurel and asphodel and man- 
dragora and All-Heal and the like. Sophocles 
wrote a play, which is lost to us, called the 
Root-Cutters, and in it he described Medea 
cutting her evil herbs by moonlight. Such 
herbs were good for medicine or for magic; 


[126] 


ARTEMIS 


the two in those days were not far asunder. 
Dr. Rendel Harris, in his fascinating Ascent 
of Olympus, has drawn attention to the impor- 
tance of these herbal gardens in ancient re- 
ligion and he tells us the very herb to which 
Artemis owes her name, the artemisia, a worm- 
wood sometimes called mugwort. Garlands 
were made on St. John’s Eve of this and other 
magic herbs, and they possessed the power of 
“dispelling demons.’ On a manuscript of the 
eleventh century Artemis is figured presenting 
the mugwort to Chiron, the Centaur. The 
herb Artemisia grew abundantly on Mt. Tay- 
getus, the favourite haunt of Artemis. Two 
strands it would seem have gone to the making 
of the goddess, the Earth-Mother from the 
South and the maid magician, the Healer of 
the North. 


[127] 


VII. APOLLO 


O God is more Greek or perhaps so 

Greek as Apollo. He stands indeed 

as the incarnation and utterance of 

the Greek way of thinking. When, in the Ode 

to the Nativity, Milton would mark the eclipse 

and overthrow by Christianity of the Greek 
Pantheon he need only say: 


“Apollo from his shrine 
Can no more divine, 
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.” 


Moreover in Olympus itself he seems to occupy 
a position second only to Zeus himself. At his 
coming the Homeric Hyman tells us: ‘as he 
fares thro’ the house of Zeus, the Gods trem- 
ble, yea, and rise up all from their thrones, 
as he draws near with his shining bended bow.” 
Only Leto his mother remains seated. His 
first Epiphany in the J/liad (I. 43 ff.) is as 
death-dealer. Phoebus Apollo came down 
from the height of Olympus, wroth in his 


[128] 


APOLLO 


heart, his bow and quiver on his shoulders, and 
his arrows clanged as the god moved in his 
wrath, and he walked like unto the night. He 
is sudden, irresistible. For nine days he let 
fly his arrows through the host and men and 
mules and fleet dogs perished of the pestilence. 
Apollo in the Jliad is not prophet, not musi- 
cian. He is the Far Darter, the death-dealer, 
“most deadly of all the gods.” 

But if he brings disease and death, he also 
brings healing. Apollo, like Artemis, is at 
least in part a Northerner and like Artemis a 
Healer. In a remarkable article,** Profes- 
sor Grace Macurdy has shown beyond the 
possibility of doubt whence Apollo came and 
what, in one of his aspects, he originally was. 
No title of Apollo is more frequent and more 
reverent than that of Peon. Peon is god of 
Pzonia and Peonia is the land of the styptic 
Peony. In the /liad (V. 899 ff.) Zeus chides 
Ares for whining about his wound but prom- 
ises he shall be healed. ‘Thus spake he and 
bade Pzon heal, and Peon, putting the pain- 
allaying herbs on Ares’ wound, healed him for 
Ares was immortal. Like as when fig-juice by 
its quick action curdles the white milk which 
is liquid, but curdles quickly at the stirring, 


[129 ] 


MYTHOLOGY 


so Peon healed fierce Ares.”’ The peony was 
the first styptic to be discovered, it was 
brought to Greece through Persia from China 
and Japan where it is still held in high honour 
as a magic herb of portentous might. The an- 
cient herbalists teem with its praises. The 
red single species still grows on the Balkans; 
of old it grew there in “‘Apollo’s ancient gar- 
den.” Apollo and Artemis were both herbal- 
ists and it may be that from their common 
function, the notion of their twinship arose. 

Apollo was worshipped by the Hyperbo- 
reans. And who are they? Not, I think, as 
the name used to be explained, the people be- 
yond Boreas the North-Wind,—but, following 
again Professor Macurdy, the people beyond 
Bora; Bora (like its Slavonic correlative, 
gora) means mountain. Livy (XLV. 29. 9) 
speaks of the “region beyond Bora, the moun- 
tain,” that is part of what is now old Servia, 
the region bordering Pelagonia, whose chief 
city is now Monastir. There dwelt the Pzoni- 
ans, a people of Thrako-Illyrian speech. The 
foot of Bora towards Pieria is sheltered from 
all Northern blasts. There grew up the Hy- 
perborean legend, there were the rose-gardens 


[130] 


APOLLO 


of Midas, and there the “ancient garden of 
Pheebus.”’ 

Apollo was an herbalist, but he has close 
connection with trees as well as plants. It is 
still warmly discussed whether the actual name 
Apollo is derived from the root that gives us 
apple or from apellon which means a kind of 
poplar tree. Setting aside this difficult ques- 
tion, we are on safe ground in asserting that 
Apollo had close relations to both apple and 
white poplar tree, but further he was closely 
connected with the oak of his father, Zeus, 
and in later days still more closely with the 
bay-tree, or laurel. Not only at Delphi but 
as far North as Tempe in Thessaly the laurel 
was sacred to Apollo. #lian (Varia Historia, 
III. 1) tells us that Apollo made himself a 
wreath of the laurel of Tempe and taking in 
his right hand a branch of this same laurel 
“came to Delphi and took over the oracle.” 
Here at Delphi for the first time the bay be- 
came “prophetic.” Apollo was not oracular 
in Homer as we noted, but he took over the 
oracular shrine of the old Earth-Goddess, 
Themis. 

What the Daphnephoria originally was we 


[131] 


MYTHOLOGY 


learn best not at Delphi, but at Thebes. 
There, each year and for the space of a year, 
a boy of distinguished family and himself fair 
of looks and strong was chosen, Pausanias 
(IX. 10. 4) tells us, to be the priest of Apollo. 
To him was given the title of Daphnephorus, 
Laurel-Bearer. A late writer Photius (Bib- 
liotheca Cod., 289), patriarch of Constantino- 
ple in the ninth century, has preserved for us 
details of the ceremony of Laurel-Carrying 
which are of extraordinary interest. “They 
wreathe,” he says, “a pole of olive wood with 
laurel and various flowers. On the top. is 
fitted a bronze globe, from which they suspend 
smaller ones. Midway down the pole they 
place a smaller globe, binding it with purple 
fillets—but the end of the pole is decked with 
saffron. By the topmost globe they mean the 
sun, which they actually compare with Apollo. 
The globe beneath is the moon: the smaller 
globes hung on are the stars and constellations, 
and the fillets are the course of the year,—for 
they make them 365 innumber. The Daphne- 
phorus himself holds on to the laurel, he has 
his hair hanging loose, he wears a golden 
wreath and is dressed out in a splendid robe 
to his feet and he wears light shoes. There 


[132] 


APOLLO 


follow him a chorus of maidens, holding out 
boughs before them to enforce the supplica- 
tion of the hymns.” 

The strange ritual implement, half orrery 
and half maypole, shows plainly as nothing else 
could how mythology is made and how the 
godhead mounts from earth to heaven. The 
maypole first for vegetation, the moon and 
then the sun, the god as Year Demon, and last 
the young priest, the god in human form;— 
the ladder from Earth to Heaven is complete. 


[133] 


VIII. DIONYSUS 


HE word Dionysus means not “son of 
Zeus” but rather ‘““Zeus-Young Man,” 
z.€., Zeus in his young form. Di- 
onysus is not so much son of his father, as son 
of his mother. His mother’s name tells us his 
race. She is Semele, which is only the Thra- 
cian form of Zembla, in our Nova Zembla, new 
Earth. Semele is a Thracian and, Thracian, 
belongs to the so-called satem group of lan- 
guages which turn the guttural into a sibilant, 
—se for ge, the Greek for earth. Such lan- 
guages are in this respect nearer akin to Rus- 
sian, Persian, Sanskrit, than to Greek, Latin, 
and Teutonic. Semele is the Thracian Earth- 
Mother, Dionysus is her son, and on vase- 
paintings he is figured rising from the earth by 
her side. He was adopted comparatively late 
by the Hellenic religion and is always a new- 
comer to Olympus. Homer barely recognizes 
his existence. 
The figure of Dionysus, like that of Hermes, 


[134] 


DIONYSUS 


had humble beginnings. On a beautiful cylix 
now in Berlin and signed by the master Hieron 
we have the primitive figure of the god. He 
is like Hermes, just a rude pillar or post, a 
tree roughhewn and draped with an embroid- 
ered garment. He has a human head. The 
post is decorated with huge bunches of grapes 
with sprays of ivy and with great pieces of 
honeycomb. And round the god’s neck is 
a necklace of dried figs, such as now-a-days a 
Greek peasant will take with him as provision 
on a journey. He is clearly the god not of 
the vine alone but of all natural products. 
Ivy was much used in his worship and some 
have seen in the ivy the starting point of the 
god. About the tree-god, in a great chorus 
dance his worshippers the Mznads. 

Dionysus in the course of his development 
undoubtedly became the vine-god as well as 
the ivy-god. But in essence he is something 
simpler and yet of great significance. He is 
the god of the ecstasy of the worshipper; he 
is the ecstasy projected. The rapture of the 
initiated lies essentially in this, as Euripides 
himself said, that ‘“‘his soul is congregational- 
ized.” It is a group ecstasy. It is this and 
this only that we desire to emphasize in the 


[135] 


MYTHOLOGY 


figure of Dionysus, it is this that distinguishes 
him from the other Olympians. The other 
Olympians are, as we have repeatedly seen, 
projections of the desires and imaginations,— 
even social conditions of their worshippers, but 
it is only in the case of Dionysus that we 
catch the god at the moment of his making, 
at the moment when the group ecstasy of the 
worshipper projects him. Plato (Phado, 69) 
has preserved for us an Orphic text: ‘Many 
are the wand-bearers, but few are the Bac- 
choi.” Many perform the rite of Bacchus, 
few become or, as we should say, “project” 
the god himself. Probably all pagan religions 
went through this stage in which in ecstasy 
they projected their god, but the Olympians 
have long passed beyond it. Theirs is the 
sober service of prayer and praise and sacri- 
fice—-God and man are sundered, eternally 
distinct. 

It has been always noted, though till lately 
never really explained, that Dionysus alone of 
the Greek gods is always attended by a revel 
rout of Mznads and Satyrs. Zeus, Athena, 
Hermes have no such attendants. Dionysus 
is surrounded by a ¢thiasos, that is by a band 
of worshippers who project him. Out of the 


[136] 


DIONYSUS 


Bacchoi emerges Bacchus. But at this point 
it will rightly be asked how could a company 
of Mznads, young women, project the figure 
of a young male god? ‘They could not and 
they did not. The Satyrs project Dionysus, 
but the Menads project the figure of the 
Mother. The worship of Dionysus is always 
dual, of mother and son, though in later poetry 
the mother sometimes appears as nurse. Thus 
Sophocles, in the Gidipus at Colonus (679): 


“Footless, sacred, shadowy thicket, where a 
myriad berries grow, 

Where no heat of the sun may enter, neither 
wind of the winter blow, 

Where the Reveller Dionysos with his Nursing 
Nymphs will go.” 


The Bacchants are the Mothers and theirs is 
the magical power to make the whole world 
break into blossom; they tend the young of 
the wild things. 


“And one a young fawn held, and one a wild 

Wolf cub, and fed them with white milk, and 
smiled 

In love, young mothers with a mother’s breast 

And babes at home forgotten!” 


[137] 


MYTHOLOGY 


On Mt. Cithzron all creation stirs anew to life 
at the great ritual of the Mothers: 


“And all the mountain felt, 
And worshipped with them; and the wild things 
knelt 
And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness 
Was filled with moving voices and dim stress.’ * 


Such are the moments when the gods are made. 


[138] 


a ie 


IX. ZEUS 


E have left Zeus to the end mainly 
because his figure is not only su- 
preme but in one way different 


from that of the other Olympians. He is 
more elemental, there is in him more of the 
thing worshipped and less of the worshipper. 
His “element” is quite clearly and avowedly 
the sky, the upper air. When the gods di- 
vided all things into three lots, Homer (J1., 
XV. 187 ff.) tells us Poseidon drew the sea, 
Hades the murky darkness, and Zeus “the 
wide heaven.’ In his monumental work Zeus, 
the European Sky-God, Mr. A. B. Cook has 
shown that Zeus is the Sky in its two aspects, 
the Bright Sky to which belong the ether, the 
Sun, and Moon, and every shining constella- 
tion, the Dark Sky with the thunder, the 
storm cloud, and the rain. So in Homer, Zeus 
is before all things the Loud Thunderer, the 
Cloud Gatherer, “he lighteneth, fashioning 
either a mighty rain unspeakable, or hail, or 


[139] 


MYTHOLOGY 


snow, when the flakes sprinkle all the ploughed 
lands.” #© His messenger is Iris, the Rain- 
bow. 

The human Zeus of Homer scarcely com- 
mands admiration; he is shamelessly licen- 
tious, he bullies and even maltreats his wife; 
when his will is crossed, he is apt to behave 
like an uncontrolled thunderstorm; but there 
are beginnings of higher things, specially in the 
kindly aspect of Zeus as God of strangers, sup- 
pliants and even beggars. It is, however, to 
the profoundly religious A%schylus that we 
mainly owe the moralizing of the character of 
Zeus. Zeus was to him, through faith, the 
solution of all world problems: “Zeus, Power 
unknown, whom, since so to be called is his 
pleasure, I so address. When I ponder upon 
all things, I can conjecture naught but ‘Zeus,’ 
to fit the need, if the burden of vanity is in 
very truth to be cast from the soul.” (Aésch., 
Agamemnon, 160 ff.) ‘“‘Never, never shall 
mortal counsels outpass the Harmony of 
Zeus” (A&sch., Prometheus Bound, 551). 

It happens very fortunately that Phidias in 
his great chryselephantine statue of Zeus em- 
bodied the ideals of the age of A‘schylus, and 
still more fortunately some of the impressions 


[140] 


ZEUS 


are recorded of the spectators of the statue. 
Quintilian (XII. 10. 9) said of the Olympian 
Zeus that “its beauty seemed to have added 
something to revealed religion.” Dio Chry- 
sostom (XII. 14) wrote: “our Zeus is peaceful 
and altogether mild, as the guardian of Hellas 
when she is of one mind and not distraught 
with faction, an image gentle and august in 
perfect form, one who is the giver of life and 
breath and every good gift, the ‘common father 
and saviour and guardian of mankind’ ”—so 
far as it was possible for a mortal to conceive 
and embody a nature infinite and divine. The 
image brought to the troubled heart of the be- 
holder something of its own large repose, for, 
“if there be any of mortals whatsoever that is 
heavy laden in spirit, having suffered sorely 
many sorrows and calamities in his life, nor 
yet winning for himself sweet sleep, even such 
an one, methinks, standing before the image 
of the god, would forget all things whatsoever 
in his mortal life were hard to be endured, so 
wondrously hast thou, Phidias, conceived and 
wrought it and such grace and light shine 
upon it from thine art.” 


[r4r] 


CONCLUSION 


T is fitting that our argument should end 

with the great plastic image of Zeus, for 

this brings us to the very core or kernel of 
our debt to Greek mythology. This debt is 
two-fold. We owe to Greek mythology, first, 
the heritage of a matchless imagery, an imag- 
ery which has haunted the minds of poets and 
artists down to the present day, second, a 
thing, as we shall see, intimately connected 
with this imagery, the release of the human 
spirit in part at least from the baneful obses- 
sion of fear. 

First as to the heritage of imagery. Let us 
say at once that the debt is spiritual and not 
to be measured by definite borrowings. The 
modern poet or artist does not adopt a Greek 
myth as we may take over a bit of Roman 
Law, or a definite discovery in mathematics, 
or some abstract conception in Greek philoso- 
phy. It would indeed be easy—and exceed- 
ingly tedious—to note and tabulate how often 


[142] 


CONCLUSION 


Shakespeare or Milton or Keats or Tennyson 
have suddenly illuminated their verse by a 
“classical allusion.” It is harder, but more 
profitable, to ask that these “classical allu- 
sions,” these mythological images and myths, 
have this magical power of illumination. 

The effect of Greek imagery on a poet’s 
mind probably defies ultimate analysis, but 
this much may be said. An image is a thing 
widely different from an abstraction. It is 
not in any sense even a collection of qualities 
abstracted and recombined for purposes of 
religious edification. A nation less gifted 
loads the name of its god with epithets and his 
idol with attributes; the Greek, because dow- 
ered with imagination, feels his god as a 
personality, with a live human history. This 
god is as much the outcome of his emotions 
as of his intellect—perhaps even more. The 
life of the Greek people is re-lived in him. It 
is because of this great actuality of the Greek 
gods that we have been at pains to show in 
detail how they came to be, how they express 
and project the life of the people who imagined 
them. 

But reality in godhead, though it is much, 
though it lends to the divine figures a warmth 


[143] 


MYTHOLOGY 


and solidity and gladness that cheers and sup- 
ports, is not enough. For a god to be really 
a god, he and his myth must touch us with 
some remote and magical appeal, something 
of light supernal and grace unspeakable, some- 
thing that gives release from the ever im- 
minent actual. It is, I think, through this 
blend of the real and the unreal that the gods 
and myths of the Greeks remain perennially 
potent in literature, while the mythical mon- 
strosities of Egypt, Assyria, India are doomed 
to a sterile death. 

The second factor in our debt to Greek 
mythology is perhaps not greater, but simpler 
and much more easy to formulate. It is that 
from religion Greek mythology banished fear, 
fear which poisons and paralyzes man’s life. 


“Who is there,’ asks the Roman poet, Lucretius, 
“whose mind does not shrink into itself with 
fear of the gods?” *" 


Praeterea cui non animus formidine divum 

Contrahitur? 

One people, one only, the Greeks. To them 
religion was a thing of glad confidence, of high 
fellowship with the gods. Some rites of fear 


[144] 


CONCLUSION 


and repulsion they kept, for ritual is always 
conservative, but their mythology and _ the- 
ology, in their representations of the gods, was 
informed throughout by reason, lighted by 
beauty; it was a thing, as they themselves 
would say, of sophrosyne, of sane thinking and 
feeling. 

How was fear banished? By the making of 
beautiful images. The first gift of the Greek 
genius brought inevitably in its train the sec- 
ond. This connection is to us of supreme in- 
terest and of no small psychological impor- 
tance. By some inspired instinct, the Greek 
seems to have anticipated in practice the latest 
discoveries in modern psychology and espe- 
cially in modern therapeutics. To banish 
fear, to banish any evil, we must exercise not 
the will but the imagination, we must not so 
much determine to be brave, not make “good 
resolutions,” but think brave, cheering 
thoughts, think good things, beautiful things. 
Plato desired for the young citizens of his ideal 
Republic that they should “pasture” their 
minds on beautiful thoughts. In a word, ac- 
cording to the new psychology of Coué, Bau- 
douin, and a host of disciples, if will and im- 
agination conflict, it is imagination that comes 


[145] 


MYTHOLOGY 


off victor. ‘Thought, imagination is the start- 
ing point of action. And above all, let that 
thought be active, live, positive, not negative. 
As Baudouin #8 has well said: “Veni Creator 
is in all ways’ a much surer method of ex- 
orcism than Vade retro Satanas.” As a Greek 
would think it, it is better to domicile the 
Eumenides than to expel the Erinyes. 

The religious influence of the Olympian 
gods, mild, serene, beautiful, has been incal- 
culable. Touched by their humanity, the He- 
brew Jehovah lost much of his savagery, many 
of the traits he owes to the irresponsible thun- 
derstorm. When in the Middle Ages Greek 
civilization and with it the figures of the Greek 
gods suffered eclipse, the banished ghosts of 
superstition came flocking back, man is hag- 
ridden by fear and fear engenders savagery; 
the Inquisition is the logical outcome of a ter- 
ror-stricken conscience. His terrors can only 
be abated by a Renaissance, a rebirth of the 
old Greek habit of thinking in calm, beauti- 
ful imagery. Each generation has its own ter- 
rors; we are now not panic stricken by the 
pains of Hell, we shiver instead before the 
perils of heredity, the hidden germ, the broken 
nerve, the insistent phobia. We still need to 


[146] 


CONCLUSION 


think Greek thoughts and feed our souls upon 
Greek imagery. Ruskin has told us why we 
need the Greeks: 

“There is no dread in their hearts; pensive- 
ness, amazement, often deepest grief and deso- 
lation, but terror never. Everlasting calm in 
the presence of all fate, and joy such as they 
might win, not indeed from perfect beauty 
but from beauty at perfect rest.” 


[147] 


te. 





NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 





NOTES 


1. Odyssey, V. 43-55, translation by J. W. Mackail. 

2. Odyssey, X. 275-280 and 302-306, translation by 
J. W. Mackail, London and New York. 

3. Odyssey, XXIV, 1-12, translation by S. H. Butcher 
and A. Lang, London and New York, 1900. 

4. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III. 459. 

5. Aristophanes, Knights, 550. 

6. Sophocles, GQidipus at Colonus, 700 ff., translation by 
D. S. MacColl. (Made for me.) 

7. Festus, De significatione verborum, 101, “Hippius.” 

8. Euripides, Hippolytus, 1201 ff., translation by Gil- 
bert Murray, London, 1906. 

9. Sophocles, Trachinie, 9 ff., translation by J. E. H. 

10. Odyssey, IX. 275 ff., and 524, translation by J. W. 
Mackail. 

11. Euripides, Electra, 458 ff., translation by Gilbert 
Murray, London, 1912. 

12. Euripides, Trojan Women, 511 ff., translation by 
Gilbert Murray, London, 1912. 

13. Odyssey, III. 3 ff., and 55 ff., translations by J. W. 
Mackail. 

14. Euripides, Bacche, 130 ff., translation by Gilbert 
Murray, London, 1906. See n. 8. 

15. Hesiod, Works and Days, 69 ff., translation by D. S. 
MacColl. (Made for me.) 

16. Odyssey, IX. 633 ff., translation by J. E. H. 

17. Aeschylus, Eumenides, 46 ff., translation by J. E. H. 

18. Aeschylus, Eumenides, 903 ff. and 938 ff., translations 
by D. S. MacColl. (Made for me.) 

19. Paradise Lost, IV. 269 ff. 

198, Shakespeare’s The Winter's Tale, IV. 4, 116. 


[151] 


NOTES 


20. Swinburne’s Hymn to Proserpine. 

21. Swinburne’s The Garden of Proserpine. 

22. Matthew Arno!d’s Thyrsis. 

23. Homeric Hymn to Demeter, translations by J. E. H. 

24. Tennyson’s Demeter and Persephone. 

25. Theocritus, Jdylls, VII. 155, translation by J. E. H. 

26. Tennyson’s Oenone. 

27. Odyssey, XX. 67 ff., translation by J. E. H. 

28. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, 700 ff., translation by 
D. S. MacColl. (Made for me.) 

29. Swinburne’s Erechtheus. 

30. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon, 
31. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I. 1 ff., translation by 

H 


32. Homeric Hymn, vi. 2, translation by Gilbert Murray. 
(Made for me.) 

33. Theognis, 1275-9, translation by J. E. H. 

34. Sophocles’ Antigone, 781 ff., translation by Gilbert 
Murray. (Made for me.) 

35. Euripides’ Hippolytus, translation by Gilbert 
Murray. 

36. Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, translations by Gil- 
bert Murray, London, 1911. 

37. Swinburme’s Atalanta in Calydon. 

38. Odyssey, XV. 407 ff., translation by J. W. Mackail. 

39. Browning’s Caliban upon Setebos. 

40. Theocritus’ Jdylls, II. 18 ff., translation by J. E. H. 

41. Euripides’ Hippolytus, translations by Gilbert 
Murray. . 

42. Anthologia Palatina, or, The Greek Anthology, VI. 
280, translation by J. E. H. 

43. Euripides’ Hippolytus, translation by W. H. Mal- 
lock, London, 1906. 

44. “The Connection of Paean with Paeonia,” in The 
Classical Review, XXVI. 249 (1912). 

45. Euripides’ Bacche, 726 ff., translations by Gilbert 
Murray. 

46. Iliad, X. 5 ff., translation by Lang, Leaf and Myers, 
London and New York, 1900. 


[152] 


NOTES 


47. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V. 1218, translation 
by H. A. J. Munro, Cambridge, England, 1891. 
48. Charles Baudouin, Suggestion et Autosuggestion, 


Paris, p. 153, translation by E. and C. Paul, New York, 
1921. 


[153] 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Cook, A. B., Zeus, a study in ancient religion. Cam- 
bridge, England, 1914. 

D’OocE, B. L., Helps to the Study of Classical My- 
thology. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1899. 

Evans, ARTHUR J., Mycenaean tree and pillar cult. 
London and New York, 1901. 

Evans, Artuur J., The Palace of Minos. London and 
New York, 1921. 

FAIRBANKS, ARTHUR, A Handbook of Greek Religion. 
New York, 1910. 

FarrBANKS, ArTHUR, The Mythology of Greece and 
Rome (presented with special reference to its influence on 
literature). New York, 1907. 

FARNELL, L. R., The Cults of the Greek States. 5 vols. 
Oxford, 1896-1909. 

Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, a Study in Magic 
and Religion. 1 vol. London and New York, 1923. 

Frazer, J.'G., Apollodorus, The Library, with an 
English Translation, in The Loeb Classical Library. 2 vols. 
London and New York, 1921. 

Fox, WM. SHERWOOD, Greek and Roman Mythology, in 
The Mythology of all Races. Boston, 1916. (Full bibliog- 
raphy.) 

GayLey, C. M., The Classic Myths in English Literature 
and in Art. Boston, 1911. 

GrupPPE, O., Griechische Mythologie und Religionsge- 
schichte, in Iwan von Miller’s Handbuch der Klassischen 
Altertumswissenschaft. V. 2. 1. and 2. Munich, 1906. 

GueErBER, H. A., Myths of Greece and Rome (nar- 
rated with special reference to literature and art). New 
York, 1893. 


[154] 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Harrincton, K. P., and Torman, H. C., Greek and 
Roman Mythology. Boston, 1897. 

Harris, JAMES RENDEL, The Ascent of Olympus. Man- 
chester, 1917. 

Harrison, JANE Etren, Prolegomena to the Study of 
Greek Religion.2, Cambridge, England, 1908. 

Harrison, JANE ELLen, Themis, A Study of the Social 
Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge, England, 1912. 

HARRISON, JANE ELLEN, Epilegomena to the Study of 
Greek Religion. Cambridge, England, 1921. 

Harrison, JANE ELLen, Ancient Art and Ritual, in The 
Home University Library. New York and London, 1913. 

Harrison, JANE Expen, The Religion of Ancient 
Greece, in Religions, Ancient and Modern. London and 
Chicago, 1905. 

Leusa, James H., The Psychological Origin and the 
Nature of Religion, in Religions, Ancient and Modern. 
London and Chicago, 1909, 

Murray, Gitsert, Four Stages of Greek Religion. 
New York, 1912. 

Oscoop, CuarLtes G., The Classical Mythology of Mil- 
ton’s English Poems. New York, 1900. 

RosBerT, Kari;—PReELLER, Lupwic, Griechische Mythol- 
ogie.* Berlin, 1894-1921. 

Roscuer, W. H., Ausfiihrliches Lexikon der Griechischen 
und Romischen Mythologie. Leipzig, 1885 ff. Supple- 
ment: Geschichte der klassischen Mythologie und Re- 
ligionsgeschichte wahrend des Mititelalters im Abendland 
und wahrend der Neuzeit. Von Otto Gruppe, 1921. 


[155] 


TAR fi, 
ie yee ink 
"a a ; 
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J r 
yes 7 





Our Debt to Greece and Rome 


AUTHORS AND TITLES 


AUTHORS AND TITLES 


Homer. John A. Scott, Northwestern University. 
SappHo. David M. Robinson, The Johns Hopkins 
University. 

Evripwes. F. L. Lucas, King’s College, Cambridge. 
AESCHYLUS AND SopHOCLES. J. T. Sheppard, King’s 
College, Cambridge. 

ARISTOPHANES. Louis E. Lord, Oberlin College. 
DEMOSTHENES. Charles D. Adams, Dartmouth College. 
ARISTOTLE’S Poetics. Lane Cooper, Cornell University. 
GREEK Histrortrans. Alfred E. Zimmern, Umiversity 
of Wales. 

Lucian. Francis G. Allinson, Brown University. 
PLAUTUS AND TERENCE. Charles Knapp, Barnard 
College, Columbia University. 


. Cicero. John C. Rolfe, University of Pennsylvania. 
. CICERO AS  PxuitosopHeR. Nelson G. McCrea, 


Columbia University. } 
CatTuLLus. Karl P. Harrington, Wesleyan University. 
LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM. George Depue 
Hadzsits, University of Pennsylvania. 

Ovip. Edward K. Rand, Harvard University. 
Horace. Grant Showerman, University of Wisconsin. 
VirGIL. John William Mackail, Balliol College, Oxford. 
SENECA. Richard Mott Gummere, The William Penn 
Charter School. 

RomAN Historians. G. Ferrero, Florence. 

MartiaL. Paul Nixon, Bowdoin College. 
PLaAToNisM. Alfred Edward ‘Taylor, St. Andrew’s 
University. 

ARISTOTELIANISM. John L. Stocks, St. John’s College, 
Oxford. 

STOICISM. Robert Mark Wenley, University of Michigan. 
LANGUAGE AND PHILOLOGY. Roland G. Kent, University 
of Pennsylvania. 

RHETORIC AND LITERARY Criticism. (Greek) W. Rhys 
Roberts, Leeds University. 

GREEK Reticion. Walter W. Hyde, University of 
Pennsylvania 

Roman REttcion. Gordon J. Laing, University of Chicago. 


7 26. 
27. 
28. 
29. 
30. 


Si: 
328 


33- 
34- 
35- 
36. 


37- 


38. 
39- 


40. 


41. 
42. 


43. 


44. 
45. 


46. 
47- 
48. 


49. 
50. 


AUTHORS AND TITLES 


MyrtHotocigs. Jane Ellen Harrison, Newnham College, 
Cambridge. 

THEORIES REGARDING THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 
Clifford H. Moore, Harvard University. 

STAGE ANTIQUITIES. James T. Allen, University of 
California. 

Greek Potitics. Ernest Barker, King’s College, 
University of London. 

Roman Poritics. Frank Frost Abbott, Princeton 
University. 

Roman Law. Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law School. 
EcoNoMIcs AND Society. M. T. Rostovtzeff, University 
of Wisconsin. 

WARFARE BY LAND AND SEA. E. S. McCartney, Uni- 
versity of Michigan. ; 

THE GREEK FATHERS. Roy J. Deferran, The Catho- 
lic University of America. 

BIoLoGy AND MeEpiIcINE. Henry Osborn Taylor, 
New Vork. 

Martuematics. David Eugene Smith, Teachers College, 
Columbia University. 

Love or Nature. H.R. Fairclough, Leland Stanford 
Junior University. 

ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY. Franz Cumont, Brussels. 
THe Fine Arts. Arthur Fairbanks, Museum of Fine 
Arts, Boston. 

ARCHITECTURE. Alfred M. Brooks, Swarthmore College. 


ENGINEERING. Alexander P. Gest, Philadelphia. 
GREEK PRIVATE LiFe, ITs SuRVIVALS. Charles Burton 
Gulick, Harvard University. 

RoMAN Private Lire, Its Survivats. Walton B. Mc- 
Daniel, University of Pennsylvania. 

Fotk Lorre. Campbell Bonner, University of Michigan. 
GREEK AND ROMAN EDUCATION. 


CHRISTIAN LATIN WRITERS. Andrew F. West, Princeton 
University. 

RoMAN PoEeTRY AND ITs INFLUENCE UPON EUROPEAN 
CULTURE. Paul Shorey, University of Chicago. 
PSYCHOLOGY. 

Music. Théodore Reinach, Parts. 

ANCIENT AND MODERN Rome. Rodolfo Lanciani, Rome. 


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